Senior Backend Engineering Manager, Recommendations

New York, New York · Hybrid · Full-time

Hinge is the dating app designed to be deleted

In today's digital world, finding genuine relationships is tougher than ever. At Hinge, we’re on a mission to inspire intimate connection to create a less lonely world. We’re obsessed with understanding our users’ behaviors to help them find love, and our success is defined by one simple metric– setting up great dates. With tens of millions of users across the globe, we’ve become the most trusted way to find a relationship, for all.

About the Role

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

What We're Looking For

• 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

Nice to Have

• 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)

Salary Range

$219,000.00 - $263,000.00 per year salary

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 range is reflective of a position based in New York City. 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.

Perks & Benefits

401(k) Matching

We match 100% of the first 10% of pre-tax 401(k) contributions you make, up to a maximum of $10,000 per year.

Professional Growth

Get a $3,000 annual Learning & Development stipend once you’ve been with us for three months. You also get free access to Udemy, an online learning and teaching marketplace with over 6,000 courses, starting your first day.

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).

Fertility Support

You and your spouse/domestic partner will get easy access to fertility care through Carrot, which offers convenient access to a range of fertility care options. We offer up to $15,000 to assist with covering fertility expenses, including basic treatments and fertility preservation.

Date Stipend

Hinge employees receive a $100 monthly stipend for epic dates – romantic or otherwise. HingeX is also free for employees and their loved ones.

ERGs

We have eight Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)—Asian, Unapologetic, Disability, LGBTQIA+, Raices, Women/Nonbinary, Parents, and Remote—that hold regular meetings, host events, and provide dedicated support to the organization & its community.

Full-Time & Hybrid Employees

What you’ll love about our New York office.

We believe in the power of in-person connection. For full-time and hybrid employees, Hinge HQ is a place to collaborate and get to know each other.

• Catered Lunches
• Commuter Benefits
• All-Gender Restrooms
• Nursing & Wellness Rooms

Hiring Process

A call to get to know each other.

As a first step, we want to have a quick chat to learn more about you, your career goals, and why you’re interested in Hinge and the role you applied for. Bring your questions—this should be a good fit for both of us!

The skills interview.

You’ll meet with members of the team you’d be working with at Hinge to discuss your experience in the key skills needed for the role. (We’ll make sure we’re on the same page about what they are before the interview.) It’s also a good time to get answers to all your nitty-gritty questions about the day-to-day work on this team.

The narrative interview.

Let’s talk past, present, and future. Come prepared with examples from previous roles that display a growth mindset. This isn’t a memorization exercise, so feel free to bring notes that help highlight prior projects.

The culture interview.

The culture interview is near and dear to our hearts, because it’s “how we work.” It’s crucial that you not only embody our values, but that you thrive at Hinge.

Making an offer.

Phew, we made it! We try to make the offer part of the process a positive one, so we’ll do our best to get it to you quickly. And we’ll be available to chat through it and answer questions. If we’re not making you an offer, we’ll let you know that too.