Staff Engineer, Applied AI

Match Group • Los Angeles, CA

2d • $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 gives AI agents access to company systems through a gateway, MCP connectors, and identity, policy, and observability layers. The platform supports agents used for tasks such as code and security review, accessibility improvements, marketing workflows, and engineering tools. The role works closely with internal teams to deliver practical solutions while making agent access safe, reliable, efficient, and straightforward to extend.

The engineer will define the platform roadmap and architecture across its gateway, connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability, and cost management. They will design identity and delegation models, enforce access controls and tool-boundary guardrails, and provide traceability, auditing, evaluations, and cost attribution. They will also set standards for MCP connectors and third-party servers, operate the platform in production, own on-call and incident response, partner with Security and platform teams, and mentor engineers.

This is a hybrid role requiring in-office collaboration three times per week at Tinder's Palo Alto, California office. The stated annual salary range is $225,000–$265,000 for a position based in Palo Alto; geographic adjustments may apply for approved work locations outside the listed location.

Requirements

• At least 8 years building backend, infrastructure, or platform systems used by other teams, 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 policies.
• 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 collaborating effectively with security teams and internal customers, turning objections into safe solutions.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills.

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 and roadmap of the agent platform across its gateway, connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability, and cost.
• Design agent identity and delegation, including acting on behalf of users, agent-owned identities for unattended jobs, short-lived scoped credentials, and traceability to a responsible human.
• Build access controls covering actions, arguments, and data classes, with human approval for irreversible actions and reviewable, tested policies.
• Enforce guardrails at the tool boundary to defend 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, usable audit trails, regression-catching evaluations, and per-team cost attribution.
• Set standards for connector and third-party MCP server onboarding, review, versioning, sandboxing, and safe defaults.
• Operate the platform in production, including owning on-call, latency budgets, failure modes, rate limits, 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, and an annual $3,000 professional development stipend.
• Mental health support through Modern Health, paid concierge medical membership, pet insurance, fitness membership subsidy, and commuter subsidy.
• Free Tinder Gold subscription.

What This Job Offers

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