Staff Software Engineer - (Matching and Recommendations)

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