Grindr is an AI-native platform powering how millions of gay people connect globally. With 15M+ monthly users, 130B+ annual messages, and a team of fewer than 200, we move fast, stay lean, and tackle technical problems at a scale few companies ever see.

At Grindr, we operate in Grindr Mode. Moderately hardcore day to day, truly hardcore when it counts. It’s about doing great work without burning out. Outcomes over outputs. Smart, driven people who raise your bar, with room to live full lives.

With more than 13.5 million monthly active users, Grindr has become a fundamental part of the LGBTQ+ community and is charting a path to make the world more free, equal, and just. Since 2015, Grindr for Equality has advanced safety, health, and human rights for millions of Grindr users and the global LGBTQ+ community in partnership with more than 100 community organizations in every region of the world. Our next evolution is underway as a public company that continues to grow and build meaningful experiences for our users. From social issues to product innovations, we're setting audacious goals for our community and the business, and leveraging the latest tech stacks and a culture of engineering excellence to make it happen. At the heart of our work in this new chapter is a shared set of operating principles centered around cultivating curiosity, thinking big, setting and expediting our ambitious goals, and growing through iteration; all while keeping our users #1.

Key Responsibilities: Team Leadership & Development: Independently manage and grow a software engineering team, taking full ownership of performance management, coaching, and career development. Build the right mix of talent by hiring, developing, and promoting engineers, while fostering a culture aligned with Grindr's Operating Principles and driving strong team engagement. Strategic Planning & Vision: Define and execute multi-year technical vision and strategic roadmaps that influence organization-wide goals, actively participating in H1/H2 planning cycles and contributing to business strategy. Make independent decisions on project prioritization, carefully balancing short-term delivery needs with long-term architectural health and sustainability. Technical Excellence & Innovation: Establish engineering excellence standards and drive adoption of best practices across your organization by auditing customer experience, software quality, and operational performance through closed-loop mechanism and metrics. Foster a culture of innovation where teams take calculated risks without fear of failure, decompose significantly complex ended problems into straightforward scalable solutions, and balance innovation opportunities with maintaining and improving existing systems. Cross-Organizational Influence: Partner effectively with Product, UX, and other engineering teams to scope projects and align on priorities, building consensus across teams and stakeholders while navigating ambiguity and resolving contentious technical or business issues. Communicate effectivley through both written and verbal channels with all levels of the organization, grom engineers to senior leadership. Business Impact & Operations: Own delivery of executive-level goals and OKRs with measurable business impact by defining and tracking business performance metrics, operational effectiveness, and customer experience indicators. Drive efficiency improvements and identify areas where engineering effort is duplicated year-over-year while ensuring teams deliver consistently without burning out key individuals. AI: Comfortable using AI to move faster — and excited by the opportunity to build AI/ML-powered features at the edge of what’s possible.

Must-Haves: Experience & Background: 10+ years in software engineering or technical leadership roles with 3+ years of people management experience, demonstrating success building, scaling, and restructuring engineering organizations with experience managing geographically distributed teams across multiple locations and time zones. Leadership Capabilities: Demonstrated ability to define vision, set clear goals, and deliver results independently with limited guidance, showing strong judgement in making technical and business trade-offs. Proven ability to identify and mitigate risks proactively before they become blockers, with experience building consensus and influencing cross-functional teams without direct authority. Technical Competency: Establish engineering excellence standards and drive adoption of best practices across your organization by auditing customer experience, software quality, and operational performance through close-loop mechanisms and metrics. Foster a culture of innovation where teams take calculated risks without fear of failure, decompose significantly complex endemic problems into straightforward scalable solutions, and balance innovation opportunities with maintaining and improving existing systems. Communication: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills across all organizational levels with experience writing strategic narratives, business cases, and technical vision documents. Ability to influence at Director level and above through data, sound judgment, and effective escalation, with success building consensus across diverse stakeholders with competing priorities. Nice To Haves: Experience in high-growth tech companies or consumer-facing applications, background managing mobile engineering teams (iOS/Android) or advertising technology, experience with metrics-driven development and OKR frameworks, previous experience as a Staff/Lead Engineer before transitioning to management, and experience managing teams through significant architectural migrations or technical transformations.