Head of Engineering

This is not a typical dating app—we’re unapologetically real, a little cheeky, and all about empowering people to connect on their terms. With over 17 million users worldwide and ranked among the Top 10 most-downloaded dating apps in the U.S. last year, we’re making love (and everything in between) more transparent, more fun, and less awkward.

We're a lean, passionate team building something that actually helps people feel seen and understood—and now we’re looking for a Head of Engineering to help us scale, experiment boldly, and bring smoother love stories to life.

**** In your first months, your primary focus won't just be shipping code - it will be running the team and engineering the 'machine' that builds the product.

You will have direct ownership over our high-level architecture, experimentation systems, and data flow. While we use Ruby on Rails, we value your ability to scale systems and lead people over specific language syntax.

We need a Head of Engineering who can ensure our backend is a competitive advantage, someone who sees architecture, reliability, and scale as product decisions, not just technical ones.

Expect a 40/40/20 split between people management, technical leadership (planning, architecture) and hands-on work (coding, code reviews, debugging).

You’ll have a free hand on day-to-day technical decisions. The only things that go through the co-founders are quarterly planning and major technical changes - the kind that take weeks of work and shift direction. Everything else is yours to call.

• Own and drive the company's backend technical vision, architecture, and long-term scalability plans;
• At first, manage 4 senior backend engineers and oversee 1-2 Dev Ops engineers (1:1s, hiring, firing, performance, growth);
• Over time, take ownership of the full technical team (±15 members);
• Translate product goals into clear technical roadmaps, sprint plans, and engineering priorities
• Take architectural decisions around performance, infrastructure, reliability, and scaling for millions of users
• Establish and improve engineering processes, code quality standards, and deployment pipelines
• Own key technical challenges: performance bottlenecks, data flow, caching strategies, infrastructure decisions
• Drive evolving adoption of AI-assisted engineering practices across the team (code generation, review, testing, tooling
• Code review and hands-on coding
• Run and support A/B testing and experimentation infrastructure (~5 experiments/week)
• Ensure API speed, uptime, data accuracy, and architectural consistency
• Design backend systems focused on scale, resilience, and fast iteration
• Implement security and privacy best practices

• 8+ years of backend development experience in production environments;
• Someone who has actually led engineering teams - not "informally mentored," but owned hiring, firing, performance reviews, and team structure;
• Someone who's held real responsibility:
  Director of Engineering, Head of Engineering, CTO at a smaller company - that level;
• You might currently be a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or Engineering Manager - title matters less than whether you've had real ownership over people and systems;
• Startup experience is non-negotiable. You've recently built or run engineering at a company under 50 people;
• Owned the backend architecture for a mobile-first, consumer-facing app;
• Still writes code and wants to. You're not looking to become a full-time manager;
• Strong communication skills - ability to explain tradeoffs, align stakeholders, and lead engineering discussions across a distributed team (EU and Asia);
• Proven experience scaling backend systems to high traffic (10k+ DAUs, ideally much higher);
• Experience driving technical planning, sprints, and…