Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Job description

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).

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in the Recommendations group, you will be one of the most senior individual contributors shaping the technical direction and strategy behind how millions of people connect across Bumble Inc.’s apps. You will operate across multiple teams, driving the design, scaling and reliability of the systems that power our recommendation and content understanding models globally.

Your expertise will help evolve our ML architecture and platform, influence best practices across engineering and science, and ensure that Bumble’s machine learning systems are fast, robust, and responsible. You will work closely with ML Scientists, Data Engineers, Product Managers, and other engineering leaders to turn research into resilient production systems that deliver measurable impact for our members.

What you’ll do

• Lead the technical strategy and architectural evolution of Bumble’s ML recommendation and content understanding systems.
• Partner with engineering and product leaders to align long-term ML platform investments with business priorities and member impact.
• Design and guide the development of scalable pipelines and serving systems that support pre-trained, fine-tuned, and in-house models at high throughput.
• Define and champion best practices for reliability, observability, and retraining across the ML lifecycle.
• Collaborate with ML Scientists to bring cutting-edge research into production, improving model performance and iteration velocity.
• Mentor and support other Machine Learning Engineers and Scientists, helping raise the bar for engineering excellence and technical decision-making.
• Drive cross-functional technical initiatives across Recommendations, Platform, and other product areas.
• Diagnose and resolve complex production challenges across data, infrastructure, and model systems, ensuring the long-term health and scalability of our ML ecosystem.
• Represent Bumble’s ML engineering practices internally (through guilds, design reviews, and architecture councils) and externally (through talks, publications, or open-source contributions).

Minimum requirements

• Typically 8+ years of professional experience building and operating machine learning systems.
• An advanced degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or a similar quantitative discipline.
• Strong software engineering background. You write clean, scalable, and maintainable code in Python or similar languages.
• Deep expertise in building, deploying, and scaling production ML systems at large scale.
• Proven ability to define and lead technical strategy or architecture for complex, distributed ML platforms or pipelines.
• Experience with production-grade ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow) and orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow, Kubeflow, Ray, or SageMaker).
• Proficiency with cloud-native environments and containerised workloads (e.g. Docker, Kubernetes, GCP/AWS).
• Deep understanding of MLOps, observability, and model lifecycle management.
• Track record of mentoring engineers and influencing engineering practices across teams.
• Excellent communicator who can translate between technical detail and business impact.
• Passionate about responsible ML — fairness, transparency, and reliability in real-world systems.

Why Join Us

• Own meaningful projects that directly impact millions of Bumble users.
• Learn and grow in a high-performing engineering team committed to mentorship and learning.
• Be part of a culture that values respect, excellence, curiosity, courage and joy.
• Enjoy competitive compensation, equity, and world-class benefits.

Location

• This role is based in Austin, and we ask that you’re within a commutable distance to this office, so that you’re able to come onsite regularly to collaborate across engineering teams.
• We have a hybrid environment that requires you to be in the office Monday - Wednesday.
• Please note: We are unable to offer Visa sponsorship at this time

$240,000 - $292,500 a year

For base compensation, we set standard ranges for all roles based on function, level, and geographic location. This position is also typically eligible to participate in our short- and long-term incentive programs. Benefits include Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k) match, Unlimited Paid Time Off Policy.

Maven Fertility: $10,000 lifetime benefit for fertility, adoption, abortion care, and more.

26 Weeks Parental Leave: For both primary and secondary caregivers.

Family & Compassionate Leave: Inclusive of domestic violence recovery.

Unlimited Paid Time Off: Take the time you need.

Company-wide Week Off: Annual collective rest for the entire company.

Focus Fridays: No meetings, emails, or deadlines—just deep work.

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.

AI in Bumble Hiring

At Bumble, we may use AI tools to support parts of our recruitment process — such as helping us record, transcribe, and summarize conversations, and supporting job alignment by comparing resumes and job descriptions to highlight skills and potential roles that may be a good match. These tools help us work more efficiently and stay focused on you during our conversations. Importantly, all hiring decisions are made by people. AI is used only to support our team’s efficiency and improve the candidate experience — not to evaluate or decide on your candidacy. Participation in AI-supported interviews and conversations is completely voluntary and will not impact your candidacy. If you’d prefer to opt out, simply let your recruiter or interviewer know at the start of a call, or anytime during the interview or conversation. Summaries and related data are retained only as long as needed in line with our internal data retention policies. If at any point you’d like a transcription or summary deleted, please contact your recruiter directly.