Staff Backend Engineer - Trust & Safety

Inclusion at Bumble Inc.

Bumble Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and we strongly encourage people of all ages, colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and non-binary people, veterans, parents, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent people to apply. We're happy to make any reasonable adjustments that will help you feel more confident throughout the process, please don't hesitate to let us know how we can help.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example: she/her, he/him, they/them, etc).

Bumble is a global dating and social networking platform with a mission to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable through kind connections. Our Trust and Safety team plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity of our platform, ensuring users feel secure, protected, and respected while interacting with one another. We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced Staff Engineer to join our Trust and Safety group to help shape the future of trust and safety on Bumble.

As a Staff Engineer in the Trust and Safety group, you’ll be the most senior individual contributor, driving the technical direction and solutions for complex systems that ensure the safety and security of our community. You will operate across several teams, collaborating with engineers, product managers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, and other cross-functional stakeholders to build and scale systems that proactively detect and mitigate harmful behaviour and safety risks. Your expertise will help lead high-impact initiatives, and influence best practices across teams within T&S and wider at Bumble. You’ll also play a role in helping to lead and shape the culture of inclusivity and openness.

With technology in the Trust space we’re responsible for complex and meaningful problems including member and content authenticity; detecting and combating toxic behaviour and content whilst encouraging kindness; creating and maintaining support, moderation, and operational tooling; and using a range of technologies including ground-breaking machine learning. We work with a vast amount of data and signals to build out infrastructure intended to support all of Bumble Inc’s brands (Bumble, Badoo, Official, Geneva, and Fruitz). We care deeply about our customer experience, and your work will directly contribute towards keeping people safe.

• Act as the most senior individual contributor within the Trust and Safety group, partnering with product and engineering manager colleagues to define and meet our Trust objectives.
• Work on Trust and Safety’s most challenging and ambitious technical problems, providing leadership, architecture, and decision making, with a focus on building scalable, secure, and high-performance solutions.
• Design and optimize backend services (primarily in PHP) to handle high-volume data flows, and improve overall system performance, reliability, and security.
• Working closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders such as Operations, CX, Policy, InfoSec (etc) to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Contribute to and maintain a healthy engineering culture through reviewing and improving practices and processes.
• Where needed, dive into specifics and get hands on with code within teams.
• Inspire, motivate, and mentor other engineers, including at senior and lead levels, ensuring high standards of code quality, testing, and scalability.
• Partner with the engineering managers to build a supportive and inclusive culture which values diversity.
• Support on other activities, such as hiring for our growing engineering team.
• Horizon scan with technology, stay up-to-date with emerging trends, tools, and techniques in Trust and Safety, and bring new solutions to the team.
• Representing our work internally and externally.
• Implement robust security measures and ensure systems adhere to industry compliance standards

• Proven experience as a backend engineer, including at a comparable level of seniority (architectural or technical leadership) for this role.
• Strong proficiency in PHP or similar backend programming languages, and extensive experience building and scaling backend systems.
• Proficiency in designing RESTful APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures
• Strong understanding of databases (SQL, NoSQL) and distributed systems
• Experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Familiarity with monitoring tools and performance optimization techniques
• Your ability to rapidly gain an understanding of the architecture of our key systems, and to form an opinion on issues and improvements.
• Experience of co-owning the technical strategy and roadmap for the area, identifying opportunities and contributing to shaping our roadmap whilst partnering with other engineering leaders.
• Your skills in architectural design and decision making for complex, ambiguous, and high-sensitivity systems and problem spaces, where you’re able to balance innovation with scalable and iterative solutions.
• Experience in building relationships across the wider business, contributing back to guilds or similar.
• Our individual contributors are not expected to balance management responsibilities, but we are looking for someone who'd be able to serve as an inspiring and motivating role model and technical mentor to our engineers (including at senior and lead level).
• Working with our engineering managers to foster a culture of high quality engineering practices, and ultimately delivery.
• Working effectively with our wider cross functional partners within key T&S spaces like policy, legal, and operations.
• Your experience of assessing and mitigating risk.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills: You build trust with stakeholders, champion a positive team environment, and ensure clarity in goals and execution.
• Believer in Bumble Inc.’s brand vision and values.

• Experience with Trust and Safety-related domains such as content moderation, anti-abuse tools, or online safety.
• Familiarity with machine learning models used in contexts such as abuse prevention, fraud detection, or content moderation.
• Experience of working with legislation such as DSA, OSA, RES etc.

• Initial call with our Talent team
• Leadership and impact interview
• Technical expertise interview
• Final stage with one of our ELT

$215,000 - $275,000 a year

About Us

Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble, Badoo, Bumble For Friends, and Geneva. The Bumble platform enables people to build healthy and equitable relationships, through Kind Connections. Founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, Bumble was one of the first dating apps built with women at the center and connects people across dating (Bumble Date), friendship (Bumble For Friends) and professional networking (Bumble Bizz). Badoo, which was founded in 2006, is one of the pioneers of web and mobile dating products. Bumble For Friends is a friendship app where people in all stages of life can meet people nearby and create meaningful platonic connections. Geneva is a group and community app for people to connect based on shared interests.