Senior Backend Engineering Manager (Recommendations)

• 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

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).
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.

• Experience with recommendation systems, search ranking, personalization, or adjacent ML-serving infrastructure
• 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
• Strong backend systems expertise – you’ve built or operated large-scale distributed systems in production
• Familiarity with data processing architectures, feature stores, and model-serving technologies (e.g., Kafka, Spark, ElasticSearch, etc)
• Proficiency in one or more backend languages (ideally Go)
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in an engineering management role
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Experience with ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch) or MLOps tooling (MLflow, Kubeflow, Airflow)
• Background in A/B testing and experimentation platforms
• Prior work at scale (millions of daily active users or equivalent throughput)