Staff Engineer, Applied AI

Match Group•Los Angeles, CA

4d•$225,000 - $265,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Tinder is hiring an engineer to own the design and evolution of its internal agent platform, which enables AI agents to work with internal systems through a gateway, MCP connectors, and identity, policy, and observability layers. The role works closely with internal teams to develop practical solutions and make the platform safe by default for agents that can access sensitive data and take consequential actions, while keeping it fast, reliable, and easy to extend. The engineer will define the platform across its gateway, connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability, and cost management. They will design agent identity and delegation, build enforceable access controls and tool-boundary safeguards, establish connector standards, and ensure agent activity is traceable and measurable. The role also operates the platform in production, owns its on-call responsibilities, and partners with Security, forward deployed engineers, and platform teams while mentoring other contributors. This is a hybrid role requiring in-office collaboration three times per week at Tinder's Palo Alto, California office. The stated salary range is $225,000–$265,000 per year, subject to geographic adjustment and other factors.

Requirements

Strong communication and collaboration skills, including experience working with real customer challenges.
At least 8 years building backend, infrastructure, or platform systems that other teams depend on, with recent hands-on work on LLM agents, tool use, or MCP.
Experience shipping identity or authorization systems, including OAuth 2.0 and OIDC, token exchange or delegation, service identity, and policy models such as RBAC, ABAC, or relationship-based models.
An attacker's mindset about agent systems and the ability to explain why prompt-level defenses are insufficient.
Experience operating gateways, proxies, or other services in the critical request path, including on-call, observability, and incident response.
Strong skills in Python or TypeScript.
Daily use of AI coding tools and a clear understanding of where they fail.
A track record of working effectively with security teams and internal customers, turning refusals into safe alternatives.

Nice To Haves

Experience with policy engines or workload identity.
Experience building or operating an LLM gateway, model router, or MCP server in production.
Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and tracing for non-deterministic systems.
Contributions to agent identity or MCP authorization standards.
Engineering background in application protection, identity and access management, or threat detection and incident response.

Responsibilities

Work closely with internal teams to build solutions for their day-to-day challenges.
Own the design of the agent platform across gateway, connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability, and cost, and write its evolution roadmap.
Design agent identity and delegation, including user delegation, agent-owned identities for unattended jobs, short-lived scoped credentials, and action traceability to a responsible human.
Build access controls covering individual actions, arguments, and data classes, including human approval for irreversible actions and reviewable, tested policies.
Build tool-boundary guardrails against prompt injection through tool output, confused-deputy access, data exfiltration, and over-broad scopes.
Make agent behavior observable through tool-call and decision traces, investigator-usable audit trails, regression-catching evaluations, and per-team cost attribution.
Set standards for connectors and third-party MCP servers, including onboarding, review, versioning, sandboxing, and safe defaults.
Operate the platform in production and own on-call responsibilities, including latency budgets, failure modes, rate limits and quotas, kill switches, and incident response.
Partner with Security, forward deployed engineers, and platform teams.
Mentor engineers who build on and contribute to the platform.

Benefits

Flexible vacation and 10 sick days.
Time off to volunteer and charitable donations matched up to $15,000 annually.
Comprehensive health, vision, and dental coverage.
100% 401(k) employer match up to 10%.
Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).
100% paid parental leave, including for non-birthing parents, and family-forming benefits.
Mentorship through the MentorMatch program.
Access to more than 6,000 online courses through Udemy.
Annual $3,000 professional development stipend.
Mental health support through Modern Health.
Paid concierge medical membership.
Pet insurance.
Fitness membership subsidy.
Commuter subsidy.
Free Tinder Gold subscription.