Staff Cloud Engineer

Grindr • Chicago, IL

4d • $134,443 - $179,257 • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Staff Cloud Engineer at Grindr, you will play a crucial role in shaping the technical direction of the company's cloud infrastructure platform. You will collaborate closely with engineering teams to define scalable infrastructure patterns, enhance developer experience, and evolve the systems supporting millions of global users. This is a high-ownership position, especially as Grindr accelerates its AI-native roadmap, where infrastructure is a strategic advantage for rapid experimentation, global scale, and high-availability systems.
Grindr operates under a "Grindr Mode" philosophy: moderately hardcore day-to-day, truly hardcore when it counts, focusing on outcomes over outputs with smart, driven individuals who also value a full life.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including 5+ years focused on cloud infrastructure in production environments
• Deep AWS expertise across services such as EKS, EC2, IAM, RDS, ElastiCache, Route53, Kafka/MSK, and VPC networking
• Strong hands-on experience operating Kubernetes platforms in production at scale
• 5+ years working with infrastructure tooling including Terraform, Helm, Docker, CI/CD systems, and GitOps-style workflows
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems with strong understanding of scalability, resiliency, and infrastructure performance characteristics
• Proven ability to establish infrastructure standards and drive adoption across engineering organizations
• Strong infrastructure automation mindset with experience reducing operational overhead through tooling and platform improvements
• Actively integrates AI tools into engineering workflows for automation, observability, operational analysis, or developer productivity

Nice To Haves

• AI-native or rapidly becoming so — you actively use AI tools in your workflow and continuously explore new operational and engineering use cases
• Experience supporting SOX compliance in a public company environment and understand infrastructure governance and control requirements
• Think in platforms and systems, not tickets — you build reusable solutions that scale across teams
• Treat reliability, security, and scalability as foundational design principles
• Have successfully driven infrastructure standards adoption across multiple engineering teams
• Are comfortable influencing technical direction and collaborating across teams on complex infrastructure initiatives
• Enjoy balancing hands-on technical execution with long-term platform strategy

Responsibilities

• Architect, document, and evolve Grindr’s cloud infrastructure platform across AWS, Kubernetes, and Terraform — establishing the standards and patterns engineering teams build on
• Design and implement scalable infrastructure solutions that improve developer velocity, platform reliability, and operational efficiency across multiple AWS environments
• Lead capacity planning and performance optimization for high-volume, globally distributed systems running on EKS
• Drive infrastructure automation initiatives across provisioning, deployments, observability, security, and platform operations
• Partner closely with product engineering teams to design infrastructure patterns for new microservices and platform capabilities
• Contribute to cloud architecture decisions, infrastructure best practices, and operational readiness initiatives across the engineering organization
• Mentor engineers on infrastructure design, Kubernetes adoption, and cloud-native development practices
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI-driven infrastructure tooling and operational workflows into the platform engineering ecosystem

Benefits

• Health, Dental & Vision Full premium coverage for you. Partial coverage for dependents.
• Family Formation Up to $300,000 in fertility and family-building support, covering IVF, surrogacy, egg freezing, and adoption.
• Retirement: 401(k) with 6% match and immediate vesting.
• Compensation: Industry-competitive compensation, company bonus, and equity for every employee.
• Gender-Affirming Care : Industry-leading gender-affirming offerings with up to 90% cost coverage, access to Included Health, monthly stipends for HRT, and more.
• Time Off & Rest Flexible vacation policy. Two company-wide rest weeks per year.
• Other Benefits: Monthly stipends for cell phone, internet, wellness, food, and commuting, breakfast/lunch

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed