Staff Engineer, Applied AI

Our Mission:

As humans, there are few things more exciting than meeting someone new. At Tinder, we’re inspired by the challenge of keeping the magic of human connection alive. With tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions of downloads, 2+ billion swipes per day, 20+ million matches per day, and a presence in 190+ countries, our reach is expansive—and rapidly growing.

We work together to solve complex problems. Behind the simplicity of every match, we think deeply about human relationships, behavioral science, network economics, AI and ML, online and real-world safety, cultural nuances, loneliness, love, sex, and more.

The Team or Role

Agents now do real work at Tinder. They review code, security risks, accessibility, make UI improvements, help marketing teams with their workflows, and run inside engineers' coding tools and in Slack. Every one of them reaches our internal systems through our agent platform: a gateway, a growing set of MCP connectors, and the identity, policy and observability layers around them.

We're hiring the engineer who owns that platform's design and functions by closely collaborating with internal teams on real use cases. You'll make it safe by default for agents that can read sensitive data and take consequential actions, fast and reliable enough that teams want to build on it, and simple enough that the next connector or agent takes days, not weeks.

Where you’ll work:

This is a hybrid role and requires in-office collaboration three times per week in our Palo Alto, California office.

In this role, you will:

• Work closely with internal teams to build real solutions for challenges they are facing day to day.
• Own the design of the agent platform across gateway, connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability and cost, and write the roadmap for how it evolves.
• Design identity and delegation for agents: acting on behalf of a user, agent-owned identities for unattended jobs, short-lived scoped credentials, and every action traceable to a responsible human.
• Build access control beyond tool allowlists: per-action, per-argument and per-data-class policy, human approval for irreversible actions, and policy that's reviewable and tested.
• Build guardrails enforced at the tool boundary, not in prompts, against prompt injection through tool output, confused-deputy access, data exfiltration and over-broad scopes.
• Make agent behavior observable: traces of tool calls and decisions, audit trails investigators can use, evals that catch regressions when models or prompts change, and per-team cost attribution.
• Set the bar for connectors and third-party MCP servers: onboarding, review, versioning, sandboxing and safe defaults.
• Run the platform as production and own its on-call: latency budgets, failure modes, rate limits and quotas, kill switches and incident response.
• Partner with Security, our forward deployed engineers and platform teams, and mentor the engineers who build on and contribute to the platform.

You'll need:

• Great communication and collaboration skills, experience working with real challenges of customer
• 8+ years building backend, infrastructure or platform systems that other teams depend on, with recent hands-on work on LLM agents, tool use or MCP.
• Experience shipping identity or authorization systems: OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, token exchange or delegation, service identity, and policy models (RBAC, ABAC or relationship-based).
• An attacker's mindset about agent systems, and the ability to explain why prompt-level defenses aren't enough.
• Experience operating gateways, proxies or other services in the critical request path, including on-call, observability and incident response.
• Strong skills in Python or TypeScript, and daily use of AI coding tools with a clear sense of where they fail.
• A track record of working well with security teams and impatient internal customers, turning "no" into a safe "yes, like this."

Nice to have:

• Experience with policy engines or workload identity.
• Built or operated an LLM gateway, model router or MCP server in production.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and tracing for non-deterministic systems.
• Contributions to agent identity or MCP authorization standards.
• Engineering background in application protection, identity and access management, or threat detection and incident response.

Salary Range:

$225,000 - $265,000 a year

Factors such as scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience, education/training, job-related skills, internal peer equity, as well as market and business considerations may influence base pay offered. This salary will be subject to a geographic adjustment (according to a specific city and state), if an authorization is granted to work outside of the location listed in this posting.

We don’t just accept difference, we celebrate it

We strive to build a workplace that reflects the rich diversity of our members around the world, and we value unique perspectives and backgrounds. Tinder is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace where we welcome people of all sexes, gender identities, races, ethnicities, disabilities, and other lived experiences.

If you require reasonable accommodation to complete a job application, pre-employment testing, or a job interview or to otherwise participate in the hiring process, please contact recruiter contact.

Our benefits for full-time employees

Parental Leave

100% paid parental leave (including for non-birthing parents) and family forming benefits

Plan for the Future

100% 401(k) employer match up to 10%, Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP)

Personal Growth

Mentorship through our MentorMatch program, access to 6,000+ online courses through Udemy, and an annual stipend for your professional development

Give back

Time off to volunteer and charitable donations matched up to $15,000 annually

Investment in your wellness

Access to mental health support via Modern Health, paid concierge medical membership, pet insurance, fitness membership subsidy, and commuter subsidy

Flexible Vacation

With no waiting period and 10 annual wellness days

If you require reasonable accommodation to complete the hiring process, please speak to your Talent Acquisition Partner directly.