AI Data Engineer Lead at Grindr

At Grindr we are building the global gayborhood in your pocket, connecting more than 13.5 million monthly active users and advancing safety, health, and human rights for the LGBTQ+ community through Grindr for Equality. We are now looking for an experienced engineering leader who is excited to shape the data foundations that will power the next generation of AI features on our platform.

What is this role?

This is a full-time, lead-level AI Data Engineer position offered on a hybrid schedule. You will split your time between our Palo Alto or San Francisco offices, with required in-office days on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the rest of the week wherever you work best.

What will you do?

• Design, implement, and scale data pre- and post-processing pipelines that prepare high-quality datasets for training machine-learning models used in recommendations, large language models, ads, visual search, growth, and trust-and-safety features.
• Establish the overall strategy and tooling for our ML Data Engine, selecting infrastructure components, building orchestration workflows, and creating monitoring solutions that keep data flowing reliably between systems and teams.
• Collaborate with ML engineers, privacy, and security stakeholders to ensure data governance, performance tuning, and compliance are built into every pipeline from day one.

What makes you a great fit?

You hold a bachelor’s degree in computer science, mathematics, physics, or a related field and bring at least five years of hands-on experience building production-grade data pipelines for machine-learning workloads, including two or more years in a technical leadership capacity. You are fluent in Python, Java, SQL, and Git, and you have shipped distributed systems using Airflow, Kubernetes, Docker, Snowflake, and Spark. You have designed real-time and batch ETL pipelines that handle large volumes of text data for NLP or large-language-model use cases, and you are comfortable working with both relational and NoSQL databases. Excellent communication skills in English help you guide cross-functional initiatives and mentor fellow engineers.

What's in it for you?

We offer a base salary range of $160,000–$280,000 USD along with eligibility for company equity and bonus programs. Additional benefits include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and partial coverage for dependents, a 401(k) plan with a 6 percent company match and immediate vesting, generous paid time off, flexible wellness and commuting stipends, onsite meals, and yearly travel and leisure allowances. We also provide industry-leading gender-affirming care benefits and a culture built around curiosity, ambitious goals, and continuous iteration.