Senior Backend Engineering Manager, Hinge
Recommendations
$219-263k
Dating app for meaningful relationships
Be an early applicant
Dating app for meaningful relationships
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$219-263k
201-500 employees
Company mission
To create a less lonely world by inspiring intimate, in-person connections.
Role
Who you are
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in an engineering management role
- Strong backend systems expertise – you've built or operated large-scale distributed systems in production
- Experience with recommendation systems, search ranking, personalization, or adjacent ML-serving infrastructure
- Proficiency in one or more backend languages (ideally Go)
- Familiarity with data processing architectures, feature stores, and model-serving technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, ElasticSearch, etc)
- Track record of hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineering teams
- Ability to communicate technical trade-offs clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
Desirable
- Experience with ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) or MLOps tooling (MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow)
- Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Background in A/B testing and experimentation platforms
- Prior work at scale (millions of daily active users or equivalent throughput)
What the job involves
- At Hinge, the recommendation engine is a central part of our product. Every interaction users have with each other on our app begins with the systems your team builds and owns
- As the engineering manager of this team, you will help drive the strategy and execution behind the infrastructure and features that power our recommendations
- You’ll work closely with machine learning engineers, product managers, data scientists, and data engineers to build systems that balance personalization, fairness, and user experience at scale, from low-latency match-serving pipelines to the candidate retrieval and ranking systems that determine who users see and when
- Our ability to provide good recommendations is central to achieving trust, engagement, and, most importantly, whether people can find who they’re looking for on Hinge
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 6-8 engineers building recommendation services
- Partner with ML to productionize recommendation models and ensure low-latency, high-availability serving infrastructure
- Own the technical roadmap for the recommender platform, balancing new capabilities with reliability and performance improvements
- Drive architecture decisions for recommendation and search infrastructure
- Establish and maintain engineering standards for code quality, testing, observability, and incident response
- Collaborate with Product, Design, and cross-functional engineering teams to define and deliver product-facing recommendation features
- Manage hiring, performance reviews, career development, and team culture
Our take
Hinge is a dating app that stands out by prioritizing meaningful relationships over casual hookups. Designed for people seeking long-term commitments, it moves away from the typical "swipe" approach popularized by apps like Tinder. Instead, Hinge emphasized detailed profiles and compatibility-based recommendations so used can make deeper, more genuine connections.
Back in 2019, half of single people in the US had never tried a dating app. Fast forward to today, and online dating is just part of the norm. Hinge has carved out its place in this market by focusing on long-term meaningful relationships, and is certainly meeting the growing demand for companionship while riding the wave of the online dating trend.
The "dating app designed to be deleted" is the fastest-growing dating app on the market and with online dating becoming the mainstream, Hinge looks pretty set to stay at the top.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
48% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Dec 2014
$12m
SERIES A
Jul 2014
$4.5m
CONVERTIBLE
Total funding: $20.6m
Company benefits
- Hybrid and Remote Work: If you're hybrid, you'll come in three times a week. We host our biweekly All-Hands meetings on Wednesdays (often with sweet treats).
- Dating: Experience what our users experience. All US-based Hinge employees receive a $100 monthly stipend for epic dates. Hinge Premium is also free for all employees and their loved ones.
- Retirement Benefits: We match 100% of the first 10% of pre-tax 401(k) contributions you make, up to a maximum of $10,000 per year.
- Health Insurance: high-quality medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your family.
- Paid Time Off: 20 accruable vacation days annually. Plus 1 floating holiday, 10 wellness days, 1 community service day, and a generous company holiday calendar. PTO increases with tenure after 2 years with the company.
- Parental Leave & Planning: When you become a new parent, you’re eligible for 100% paid parental leave (20 paid weeks for both birth and non-birth parents). We also subsidize fertility care and preservation services.
- Wellness: We subsidize OneMedical, ClassPass, and CitiBike memberships. You and your dependents also have access to individual therapy, group therapy, and coaching services through Modern Health.
- Professional Growth: receive a $3,000 annual Learning & Development stipend after three months, along with free access to Udemy, an online marketplace with over 6,000 courses, starting on your first day.
- Meals: Receive a $30 weekly Seamless credit. In the NYC office, we offer plenty of options for snacks and drinks. Plus, free catered lunches in the office Tuesday through Thursday. In-office lunch varies by location.
- Community Service: We match charitable donations dollar for dollar to a maximum of $15,000 per employee, and give every US-based employee 1 day off for community service annually.
- Commuting: Every US-based hybrid employee gets a $125 monthly commuter subsidy to use for public transportation, parking, bike maintenance and storage, and more.
- Pets: Feel free to bring your best friend to work with you to the NYC office. For US-based employees, we’ll provide pet insurance for your furry family members, too.
- Legal Coverage: You’ll receive low cost access to legal coverage that covers custody and support matters, divorce, real estate and home ownership, tenancy issues, tax issues, wills and estate planning, and more.
- Fertility Support: You’ll get easy access to fertility care through Carrot, from basic treatments to fertility preservation. We also provide $10,000 toward fertility preservation. You and your spouse/domestic partner are both eligible.
Company HQ
West Village, New York, NY
Leadership
Justin McLeod
(Founder & CEO)Having studied at Colgate University and Harvard Business School, Justin founded Hinge in February 2011. He has served as CEO since.
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