Staff MLOps Engineer

Grindr LLC; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health, dental, and vision insurance

Generous 401K plan with 6% match

Flexible vacation policy

Monthly stipends for wellness and commuting

Job summary

A leading technology firm in the United States is seeking a Staff MLOps Engineer who will design and manage the infrastructure supporting machine learning models. The role requires strong experience in building scalable ML systems and pipelines. You'll collaborate with engineering teams and drive improvements across ML workflows, all while contributing to a mission that impacts the LGBTQ+ community significantly. This is a hybrid role with a vibrant workplace culture and competitive benefits.

Qualifications

• 5+ years experience in MLOps, ML platform engineering, or ML infrastructure.
• Strong experience in building production ML pipelines.
• Proven ability to produce well-engineered, maintainable software.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain end-to-end ML pipelines for data ingestion and model training.
• Implement monitoring and observability for ML systems.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to streamline workflows.

Skills

Building robust automated pipelines

Production ML pipelines

Strong programming in Python

Experience with big data technologies

Excellent engineering fundamentals

Strong understanding of cloud platforms

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field

Tools

Snowflake

Spark/pySpark

Airflow

Kubernetes

Docker

Helm

Job description

This is a hybrid role based in our Bay Area (SF or Palo Alto) or our Chicago offices and will require you to be in office Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What’s so interesting about this role?

We at Grindr believe that AI can revolutionize the dating industry. As a Staff MLOps Engineer, you will build and own the infrastructure, tooling, and scalable systems that make high-impact AI possible. You’ll architect and maintain the platforms that power data ingestion, feature computation, model training, automated evaluation, deployment, and ongoing monitoring for the ML teams building recommendations, LLM-based experiences, ads, visual search, growth, and trust & safety. You will design foundational systems that allow our ML engineers to experiment faster, ship models more reliably, and operate them with confidence in production.

What’s the job?

We’re looking for an exceptional MLOps engineer who’s passionate about enabling ML at scale, (>6M daily active users and 100’s of millions of daily user interactions). Someone who loves building robust, automated pipelines; creating reliable production training and inference systems; and establishing the infrastructure and processes that accelerate ML product development across the organization.

In this role, you will shape and execute the strategy for Grindr’s ML platform and end-to-end model lifecycle.

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain end-to-end ML pipelines for data ingestion, feature computation, model training, validation, deployment, and inference, all at substantial scale of data
• Stand up and manage a feature store, ensuring feature consistency, lineage, and reuse across teams.
• Expertise with best in class tools for managing deployment, scheduling, and environments and how to use them in the specialized regime of ML Infrastructure.
• Develop automated model deployment workflows with CI/CD, safe rollout strategies, and reproducibility guarantees.
• Implement monitoring and observability for ML systems, including data quality checks, drift detection, performance metrics, and alerting.
• Build and support training environments with experiment tracking, distributed training, hyperparameter tuning, and artifact and environment management.
• Collaborate with ML engineers and data engineers to streamline workflows, improve model iteration speed, and enforce MLOps best practices.
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and maintainability of ML systems through strong engineering and operational rigor.

What we’ll love about you

• Bachelor’s degree in CS, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field.
• 5+ years experience in MLOps, ML platform engineering, ML infrastructure, or similar roles.
• Strong experience building production ML pipelines and supporting end-to-end ML workflows.
• Excellent engineering fundamentals: Python, SQL, bash, Git.
• Experience with big data and distributed compute: Snowflake, Spark/pySpark, Airflow, Kubernetes, Docker, Helm.
• Experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow) sufficient to support training pipelines and deployment workflows.
• Strong understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Ability to produce well-engineered, maintainable software with tests, documentation, and operational rigor.
• Experience with data quality frameworks, observability tooling, or experiment tracking systems.

We’ll really swoon if you have

• Experience implementing full model lifecycle management (from data → training → deployment → monitoring).
• Experience with vector databases, embeddings pipelines, or retrieval systems.
• Familiarity with NLP/LLM-based data pipelines or image/vision data workflows.
• Experience with recommendation system infrastructure.
• Strong grasp of classical ML concepts as they relate to platform design.
• Knowledge of data governance, compliance, retention, and classification.
• Track record of partnering with research/ML teams to operationalize models at scale.

What you’ll love about us:

• Mission and Impact: Grindr is building the global gayborhood in your pocket. Your role will impact the lives of millions of LGBTQ+ people around the world. Through our success, we are making a world where the lives of our community are free, equal, and just.
• Family Insurance: Insurance premium coverage for health, dental, and vision for you and partial coverage for your dependents.
• Retirement Savings: Generous 401K plan with 6% match and immediate vest in the U.S.
• Compensation: Industry-competitive compensation and eligibility for company bonus and equity programs.
• Queer-Inclusive Benefits: Industry-leading gender-affirming offerings with up to 90% cost coverage, access to Included Health, monthly stipends for HRT, and more.
• Additional Benefits: Flexible vacation policy, monthly stipends for cell phone, internet, wellness, food, and commuting, breakfast/lunch provided onsite, and yearly travel & leisure stipend.

About Grindr:

Grindr is building the global gayborhood in your pocket. With more than 14.5 million monthly active users, Grindr has become a fundamental part of the LGBTQ+ community and is charting a path to make the world more free, equal, and just. In 2015 we introduced Grindr for Equality, our in-house non-profit which has advanced safety, health, and human rights for millions of Grindr users and the global LGBTQ+ community in partnership with more than 100 community organizations in every region of the world.

Our next evolution is underway as a public company that continues to grow and build meaningful experiences for our users. From social issues to product innovations, we’re setting audacious goals for our community and the business, and leveraging the latest tech stacks and a culture of engineering excellence to make it happen. At the heart of our work in this new chapter is a shared set of operating principles centered around cultivating curiosity, thinking big, exploring the depths of AI, setting and expediting our ambitious goals, and growing through iteration; all while keeping our users #1.

Grindr is headquartered in West Hollywood, California, with offices in the Bay Area, Chicago, and New York. With a track record of strong financial performance and plans for continued headcount growth, we aim to build a workforce of talented, passionate, and open‑minded individuals from different backgrounds, with different abilities, identities, and mindsets. Come be a part of this exciting journey to disrupt the consumer technology space, innovate products, and advance LGBTQ+ culture!

Grindr is an equal‑opportunity employer.

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