This is a hybrid role based in our Palo Alto or San Francisco offices and will require you to be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What’s so interesting about this role?

At Grindr, our mission is to show a user the right match, in the right place, at the right time. We tailor our dating platform for a diverse and global audience, so customers worldwide with different tastes and backgrounds can find their best match on every visit. We grow our relationships with our users by leveraging our deep understanding of them to provide relevant and timely recommendations. We believe the current customer experience is only scratching the surface of innovative experiences that are made possible as dating continues to shift online, and that science is at the center of delivering a step-function change for our CX.

We are looking for a highly motivated and experienced Machine Learning Engineer to join our team and help us shape the future of machine learning at Grindr. In this role, you will tackle new challenges in machine learning that will have a real impact on how people discover and interact with the world around them in the LGBT community. You will collaborate with a world-class team of research scientists and engineers to develop new machine learning algorithms, systems, and applications that will bring significant impact to our business metrics.

What’s the job?

As a Principal ML Engineer, you will have deep expertise in recommendations science. You will work with multiple teams of engineers and product managers to translate business and functional requirements into concrete deliverables. You will lead innovative efforts in Generative AI to develop new approaches to Personalization, and provide thought leadership to scientists and engineers to invent and implement scalable ML recommendations supporting new Customer Experiences.

• Lead cutting-edge algorithm development in machine learning and collaborate with other engineering teams to adopt innovations into Grindr problems.
• Collect, analyze, and synthesize findings from data to build intelligent data-driven models.
• Scope and independently solve moderately complex problems; write clean, efficient, and sustainable code.
• Be an expert in matching algorithms and recommender systems machine learning models, owning the implementation of dating recommendations in Grindr.
• Use machine learning, natural language processing, and graph analysis to solve modeling and ranking problems across dating, personalization, growth, discovery, ads, and search.

What we’ll love about you

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Math, or a related field.
• Mastery of at least one systems language (Python, Java, C++) and one deep learning framework (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras), and one data analysis library (Pandas, R).
• Extensive experience building, deploying, and maintaining end-to-end recommendation systems.
• Experience in building complex, real-time AI, ML, NLP, Recommender Systems, and Ads systems with successful delivery.
• Fundamentals in data structures, algorithm design, and complexity analysis.
• 5+ years of experience working in engineering or R&D teams on large-scale ML projects, from requirements to product launch.
• Strong track record with language modeling technologies, including generative and embedding techniques, model architectures, and evaluation benchmarks.
• Strong coding and software engineering skills, with familiarity in testing, code reviews, deployment, and Git.

We’ll really swoon if you have

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or Machine Learning.
• Experience with recommender systems and matching algorithms in the dating industry.
• Expertise in large language models or the ability to develop this expertise quickly.
• Exposure to architectural patterns of large-scale software applications.
• Experience shipping products to millions or starting a new product line.
• Experience with Hadoop, HBase, Pig, MapReduce, Bigtable, Hive, Spark.
• Peer-reviewed publications advancing applied science.

What you'll love about us

• Impact: Grindr is the leading LGBTQ social network, impacting millions worldwide.
• Locations: Based in San Francisco or Palo Alto.
• Benefits: Health, dental, vision insurance; 401K with 6% match; industry-competitive compensation; bonus and equity options.
• Inclusivity: Gender-affirming benefits, access to health services, stipends, and more.
• Additional Perks: Flexible vacation, stipends for cell, internet, wellness, food, home-office setup, and company events.