Senior Staff ML Engineer

About The Team

Grindr is an AI-native platform powering how millions of gay people connect globally. With 15M+ monthly users, 130B+ annual messages, and a team of fewer than 200, we move fast, stay lean, and tackle technical problems at a scale few companies ever see. At Grindr, we’re at the dawn of an AI-driven evolution, and you’ll be a senior technical leader shaping the vision. This is your chance to harness cutting-edge machine learning to redefine how millions of people in the LGBTQ+ community around the world connect—whether it’s an entertaining chat, a casual encounter or long-term relationship.

About The Job

Architect and oversee large-scale recommendation systems to serve millions, balancing performance and innovation. Leverage the latest LLMs to process vast conversation data and enhance user connections. Prototype, iterate, and ship production-ready ML solutions that solve real problems for our user. Provide technical leadership across teams, collaborating with engineering, data science and product teams to turn bold ideas into tangible results. Evaluate, influence, and integrate emerging AI tools and techniques at an organizational level to keep Grindr’s tech stack ahead of the curve.

Role Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building ML systems with a focus on 0-to-1 system development, platform-scale architecture, and creating new capabilities from scratch.
• Experience with recommendation systems or similar is a plus.
• Proven ability to deliver at scale, with fluency in Python and popular ML frameworks.
• A scrappy mindset—you tackle messy challenges head-on and get real results.
• Experience using data and deployment technologies (Snowflake, Airflow, Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, Spark, PySpark).
• Experience building machine/deep learning models with at least one common framework such as PyTorch, Tensorflow, or Keras.
• Experience with any public cloud environment - AWS, GCP or Databricks.

Benefits And Perks

• Health, Dental & Vision Full premium coverage for you. Partial coverage for dependents.
• Fertility and family-building support, covering IVF, surrogacy, egg freezing, and adoption.
• Retirement: 401(k) with 6% match and immediate vesting.
• Compensation: Industry-competitive compensation, company bonus, and equity for every employee.
• Gender-Affirming Care : Industry-leading gender-affirming offerings with up to 90% cost coverage, access to Included Health, monthly stipends for HRT, and more.
• Flexible vacation policy. Two company-wide rest weeks per year.
• Monthly stipends for cell phone, internet, wellness, food, and commuting, breakfast/lunch.

Grindr

Grindr is building the Global Gayborhood in your Pocket. With more than 15 million monthly active users, Grindr has become a fundamental part of the gay community and is charting a path to make the world more free, equal, and just. As a public company, we're moving into the next chapter: becoming an AI-native organization that's redefining what's possible for our community. We're embedding AI into our product and operations, moving with startup speed while operating at scale. Everything we do is rooted in impact for our users and outcomes for the business. This isn't social work, it’s impact through excellence. Business success is what gives us the power to serve our community and the seat at tables others can't reach.