Staff Software Engineer - (Matching and Recommendations)

Bumble; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 255,000 - 285,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/dental/vision insurance

Unlimited PTO

Life and disability insurance

401k with company match

Wellness benefit

Parental leave

Premium App Access

Job summary

Bumble is building a world where relationships are healthy and equitable, and machine learning is central to making that a reality for millions of people every day. As part of our Machine Learning team in Recommendations, you'll help shape intelligent systems that power meaningful connections, safer interactions, and more personalized experiences across our platform.

The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-paced environment and has a proven track record in Generative AI and Machine Learning.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building large-scale backend or distributed systems.
• Deep expertise in designing and operating high-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with cloud-native systems on GCP or similar public clouds.
• Ability to define technical strategy and influence architectural direction.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction for the recommendations platform across retrieval, ranking, and serving.
• Design large-scale distributed systems powering recommendations across teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and raise engineering standards.
• Lead platform evolution and AI-assisted engineering initiatives.
• Contribute hands-on with production code and critical designs.

Skills

Go

Kotlin

Java

Distributed systems

AI fluency

Tools

GCP

Job description

At Bumble, we're building a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable, and machine learning is central to making that a reality for millions of people every day. As part of our Machine Learning team in Recommendations, you'll help shape intelligent systems that power meaningful connections, safer interactions, and more personalized experiences across our platform.

Join our team at Bumble, where we're revolutionizing online dating through innovative AI-driven experiences. We're seeking machine learning engineers to spearhead the development of the next generation of online dating. In this role, you will be a foundational member of a small, dynamic team dedicated to creating cutting-edge solutions that redefine how people connect and form relationships online.

The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-paced environment, is a creative thinker, and has a proven track record in Generative AI and Machine Learning. If you're passionate about leveraging AI to shape the future of online connections, we want to hear from you!

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical direction for Bumble's recommendations platform, evolving the systems that service recommendations for millions of members. Identify the highest-leverage engineering investments across retrieval, ranking, and serving, while balancing relevance, marketplace health, reliability, and latency.
• Lead the design of large-scale distributed systems that power recommendations across multiple teams and domains. From online serving and feature delivery to experimentation and feedback loops, keep them simple, resilient, scalable, and elegant as the platform evolves.
• Identify and solve the highest-leverage technical problems across the recommendations stack, bring clarity to ambiguous architectural decisions, and create solutions that help multiple teams move faster.
• Raise the bar for engineering quality through technical leadership. Establish architectural principles, engineering standards, observability practices, and operational excellence that improve the quality and maintainability of systems across the organization.
• Multiply the impact of other engineers by mentoring senior engineers, influencing technical direction across teams, and sharing context and judgment on the organization’s most challenging engineering problems.
• Drive platform evolution for the long term. Lead foundational initiatives such as service decomposition, recommendation infrastructure, experimentation capabilities, developer tooling, and AI-assisted engineering that enable the organization to move faster over time.
• Remain deeply technical through hands-on contribution. Writing and reviewing high-quality code where it creates the greatest leverage. Contributing to critical designs, prototypes, and production code. Rapidly prototyping new ideas and serving as a trusted expert for the most critical parts of Bumble's recommendations platform.

About you

• Typically requires 8+ years of building large-scale backend or distributed systems, with experience delivering complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams.
• Deep expertise in designing and operating high-scale distributed systems, with strong experience in modern languages such as Go, Kotlin, Java, or similar, and a track record of building reliable production platforms.
• Strong understanding of recommendation systems, ranking architectures, or other large-scale decision systems, including concepts such as retrieval, candidate generation, ranking, feature serving, experimentation, and feedback loops.
• Experience building cloud-native systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or comparable public cloud infrastructure, with deep knowledge of scalability, resilience, observability, and operational excellence.
• Demonstrated ability to define technical strategy and influence architectural direction across multiple engineering teams through expertise, collaboration, and sound technical judgment rather than organizational authority.
• Proven experience partnering closely with Product, Data Science, Machine Learning and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous business problems into durable technical solutions.
• A track record of mentoring senior engineers, raising engineering standards, and creating leverage by improving systems, tooling, architecture, and the effectiveness of the wider engineering organization.
• Strong AI fluency, using modern AI-assisted engineering tools to improve productivity while applying thoughtful human judgment, maintaining high engineering standards, and ensuring member trust remains central to every technical decision.

Nice to Have

• Experience building recommendation systems, search platforms, personalization engines, or other intelligent decision systems.
• Experience with geospatial technologies, GIS platforms, routing systems, spatial databases (e.g., PostGIS), mapping APIs, GPS services, or other location-aware applications.
• Experience building platforms or shared infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams.
• Familiarity with experimentation platforms, feature delivery systems, event-driven architectures, or real-time data processing.
• Experience building consumer-facing products at scale.

About Us

Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble Date, BFF, and Badoo. The Bumble platform enables people to build healthy and equitable relationships, through Kind Connections. Founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, Bumble was one of the first dating apps built with women at the center and connects people across dating (Bumble Date) and friendship (BFF). BFF is a friendship app where people in all stages of life can meet people nearby and create meaningful platonic connections and community based on shared interests. Badoo, which was founded in 2006, is one of the pioneers of web and mobile dating products.

AI Fluency

AI is important to us. We're excited by people who are curious and experimental, and who think thoughtfully about how AI can amplify their impact and outcomes.

Final Compensation

Will be determined based on factors such as the selected candidate's qualifications, relevant experience, skill set, and other job-related considerations.

Benefits & Perks

• Insurance: Medical/dental/vision, 30-day eligibility. Bumble has multiple competitive offerings that will be available to you on the first of the month following date of hire.
• Unlimited PTO + 1 company-wide week off + Focus Fridays every week
• Fully paid life and long-term disability insurance
• 401k with 4% company match if you contribute 6%, 90-day eligibility
• Monthly wellness benefit and access to Noom, Unmind, and Your Money Line
• Maternity and Fertility benefit + 26 week paid parental leave
• Premium App Access

Inclusion at Bumble Inc.

Bumble Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and we strongly encourage people of all ages, colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and non-binary people, veterans, parents, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent people to apply. We're happy to make any reasonable adjustments that will help you feel more confident throughout the process, please don't hesitate to let us know how we can help.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For Example: she/her, he/him, they/them, etc).

AI in Bumble Inc. Hiring

At Bumble, we may use AI tools to support parts of our recruitment process - such as helping us record, transcribe, and summarize conversations, and supporting job alignment by comparing resumes and job descriptions to highlight skills and potential roles that may be a good match. These tools help us work more efficiently and stay focused on you during our conversations. Importantly, all hiring decisions are made by people. AI is used only to support our team’s efficiency and improve the candidate experience - not to evaluate or decide on your candidacy. Participation in AI-supported interviews and conversations is completely voluntary and will not impact your candidacy. If you'd prefer to opt out, simply let your recruiter or interviewer know at the start of a call, or anytime during the interview or conversation. Summaries and related data are retained only as long as needed in line with our internal data retention policies. If at any point you'd like a transcription or summary deleted, please contact your recruiter directly.

For further information on how we hold and manage your data, please refer to our Privacy Policy.

255000 - 285000 USD a year