Staff Backend Engineer - AWS, Kubernetes, Kotlin

About Grindr

Grindr is the world’s largest dating app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people. With around 13 million monthly active users, Grindr has become a fundamental part of the global LGBTQ community, and we take pride in empowering our users to connect, express themselves, and discover the queer world around them.

Our next evolution is underway as a newly public company looking to expand and continue to build meaningful experiences for our users. From social issues to original content, we’re blazing innovative paths with impact for our community, all while leveraging the latest tech stacks and striving for engineering excellence. At the heart of our work in this new chapter is a shared set of core values: openness and exploration, a bias for action, and strong support of the LGBTQ community.

With a track record of strong financial performance and plans for continued headcount growth, we’re looking to build a team of talented, passionate, and open-minded people who believe in our mission, align with our values, and are excited to work at the intersection of innovative technology and social impact. Come be a part of this exciting journey with us.

About The Role

Our team is growing because our user base is growing (30% in the last year!) which means we need you! We’re looking for a strong Backend Engineer who is passionate about building, testing, deploying, and working closely with the Product team to deliver new features. You will have the opportunity to solve challenging problems, work with the latest systems, collaborate with a kind and capable team, and contribute meaningfully. This position is located in Medellin, Colombia, and requires working onsite Tuesdays & Thursdays at the Grindr offices at WeWork El Poblado. Open to candidates willing to relocate within Colombia.

What You’ll Do

• Be a part of the engineering team where we implement new features and work closely with the product and design teams
• Build for the future by designing maintainable and well-tested systems to serve a global audience of millions of concurrent users (we’re big!)
• 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
• Build for the future by designing and testing simple, elegant, maintainable software
• Optimize key pieces of Grindr's platform using tools like Redis, Postgres, and Kafka on AWS services
• Innovate by guiding data-driven decisions to adopt new technologies, architectures, and workflow
• Ensure high availability of the Grindr platform through distributed systems and infrastructure engineering
• Help guide and mentor team members through pairing sessions, code reviews, and architecture reviews.
• Troubleshoot unexpected issues across various systems because being the most popular is hard… and fun :)
• Take a prominent role in optimizations, cost savings, and incident responses.
  
  

What You’ll Bring

• 12+ years of experience as a Software Engineer developing critical portions of working on Backend Systems (Service APIs, Data Processing, Messaging Services)
• Experience designing and implementing large-scale Web or API systems for high load and data consistency
• Experience with the JVM and at least one JVM language is required (such as Java, Kotlin, or Scala). Experience designing and productionizing large-scale distributed systems
• Experience designing systems that make heavy and efficient use of Cloud Services (any cloud)
• 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 continuous integration and continuous delivery
• Experience with SQL and general knowledge of database systems.
• Experience developing Production systems using Kotlin, Kubernetes, or Kafka
• Experience developing or working with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery tools, such as Github Actions or CircleCI.
• Experience of mentoring / skilling up less experienced developers.
• Have experience leading a team or initiative
• Experience working cross-functionally