MLOps Engineer

Position: Staff MLOps Engineer
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/py Spark, Airflow, Kubernetes, Docker, Helm.

• Experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, Tensor Flow) 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,…