Staff Backend Engineer - Scale Microservices (Kotlin/AWS)

Grindr; Palo Alto (CA); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, Dental & Vision

Family formation support

401(k) with match

Equity and bonus

Gender-affirming care

Flexible vacation

Monthly stipends for essentials

Job summary

Grindr seeks an experienced Backend Engineer to join a 10+ person team in a hybrid Palo Alto role, in-office Tuesdays and Thursdays. You’ll build, test, and scale backend services for millions of users, collaborating with Product and Design to deliver robust features.

You’ll optimize systems with Redis, Postgres, and Kafka on AWS, mentor teammates, and participate in architecture reviews to drive data-driven decisions and high availability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience as a Software Engineer and contributing to Backend Systems (Service APIs, Data Processing, Messaging Services)
• Experience designing and implementing large-scale systems for high load and data consistency in a microservice-based architecture
• Experience designing systems that make heavy and efficient use of Cloud Service, AWS preferred
• Passionate about testing software and systems
• Deep understanding of concurrency concepts and trade-offs
• You love figuring things out and understanding how they work end-to-end
• Experience with the JVM and at least one JVM language such as Java, Kotlin, and Scala. Experience designing and product ionizing large-scale distributed systems

Responsibilities

• Join a backend team of 10+ engineers working on key features that support millions of active users daily
• Lead projects and other engineers to implement new features and coordinate closely with product and design teams
• Own the design and development of Grindr’s backend services in a stable and scalable microservices architecture
• Work with Product Managers, Designers, and other Engineers to refine feature design and functionality
• Optimize key pieces of Grindr's platform using Redis, Postgres, and Kafka on AWS services
• Innovate by guiding data-driven decisions to adopt new technologies, architectures, and workflow
• Maintain high availability of the Grindr platform by leveraging distributed systems and infrastructure engineering, while playing a key role in optimizations, cost reduction, and incident management
• Help guide and mentor team members through pairing sessions, code reviews, and architecture reviews

Skills

Backend systems

Distributed architecture

AWS

Kotlin

Java

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Redis

Code reviews

Tools

Kafka

PostgreSQL

Redis

AWS

Job description

Grindr seeks an experienced Backend Engineer to join a 10+ person team in a hybrid Palo Alto role, in-office Tuesdays and Thursdays. You’ll build, test, and scale backend services for millions of users, collaborating with Product and Design to deliver robust features.

You’ll optimize systems with Redis, Postgres, and Kafka on AWS, mentor teammates, and participate in architecture reviews to drive data-driven decisions and high availability.