Platform Engineer, Trust and Safety

Job description

PARTIFUL'S MISSION IS TO CULTIVATE FRIENDSHIPS THROUGH SOCIAL EVENTS. We believe events are the most effective way to meet new people and make friends. Our product helps you throw incredible events, starting with memorable party pages that make it easy to plan & communicate with guests — download the app http://partiful.com/download to see how it works! We're building new ways to streamline planning, connect meaningfully in the real world, and make connections between friends-of-friends. Our ultimate vision is to power everything you do in-person with your friends, eliminating the friction of bringing your most memorable experiences to life. You can read more about our mission in The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/31/partiful-gen-z-new-years-eve/, The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/style/partiful-event-planning-parties.html, The Wall Street Journal https://www.wsj.com/articles/evites-are-out-this-new-text-message-party-planner-is-in-46e8b64f, The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/party-invitation-website-partiful/672333/, Wirecutter https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/partiful-app-review/, and USA Today https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2024/08/04/partiful-app-party-planning/72619936007/?taid=66af5128983783000189ad12&utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter. Partiful was named Google’s Best App of 2024 https://blog.google/products/google-play/google-play-best-apps-games-2024/, a Finalist for Apple’s App Store Awards https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/11/apple-reveals-45-app-and-game-finalists-for-the-2024-app-store-awards/, and Apple’s App of the Day https://apps.apple.com/us/story/id1771691398 (awarded 4x). In 2025, we were named one of TIME's 100 Most Influential Companies https://time.com/collections/time100-companies-2025/7289589/partiful/, one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies https://www.fastcompany.com/91270177/social-media-most-innovative-companies-2025-duolingo-bluesky-boston-celtics-pinterest-partiful-planoly-sesame-workshop-feeld-strava-yelp, and named to Inc. Magazine's Best in Business List https://www.inc.com/john-jannuzzi/how-partiful-became-the-life-of-gen-zs-irl-party/91263552. Our company is backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures, and advised by the founders of some of the most successful consumer social products ever made. THE ROLE At Partiful, Trust & Safety is a shared responsibility. We have always worked hard to protect our users and our platform, and now we're looking for an expert to deepen and accelerate that work across the entire company. This role is a good fit for an backend-leaning engineer who has developed a specialization in trust and safety, or a T&S engineer who thinks and builds like an platform engineer. It’s a fast-paced, high-ownership role in an environment where we move quickly, set ambitious goals, and hold a high bar for speed and technical excellence. You’ll spend most of your time on T&S, including detecting, investigating, and mitigating risks including phishing, spam, objectionable content, scraping, and other forms of fraud and abuse, and some time on product infrastructure, reliability, performance, and developer velocity. Our stack is React (web app), React Native (mobile app), Node.js, and Typescript, running on GCP with a serverless architecture. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Architect and implement AI-powered systems for real-time decision-making and policy enforcement at scale, including the scaffolding to improve those systems over time - Build observability tooling so the team can monitor abuse trends and respond to novel attack patterns quickly - Balance risk and user experience: proactively monitor the impact of protective systems on trusted users, ensuring interventions deliver more value than friction - Collaborate deeply across functions: - Partner with Operations to define policy, translating ambiguous high-judgement calls into rules that are enforceable at scale - Empower Support to handle enforcement — build out tooling, escalation paths, and appeal workflows the team and users can rely on - Work with Data Science to build sophisticated, trustworthy threat and anomaly detection - Join forces with Product Engineering and Design to keep privacy and safety considerations at the core of our product - Participate in an on-call rotation for Trust & Safety incidents and close the loop to prevent the next one - Design, build, and maintain scalable, secure infrastructure across GCP's ecosystem (Cloud Functions, Firestore, Cloud Tasks, Redis, Pub/Sub, etc.) - Collaborate with other engineers to design performant APIs, databases, and backend systems - Drive the Trust & Safety roadmap, balancing safety investment against the broader needs of the business - Join an ambitious team that moves fast, works hard, and loves what we build — and help shape the foundations and culture of T&S at Partiful! WHAT YOU'LL BRING - 3–11 years of full-stack, infrastructure engineering, or applied machine learning experience in a fast-paced or high-growth environment - 2+ years of experience in trust & safety; experience in consumer social is preferred but not required - Experience building enforcement systems end-to-end: detection, action pipelines, escalation workflows, and appeals - Fluency with common abuse vectors on consumer social platforms - Experience with legal, regulatory, and compliance requirements for trust systems - Experience designing and managing serverless or event-driven systems at scale - Strong understanding of CI/CD workflows and best practices - Experience with observability systems (such as Sentry, GCP Cloud Logging & Metrics Explorer) - Solid grasp of networking, security, and performance tuning fundamentals - Comfort working in Typescript/Node.js environments - A builder's mindset — you enjoy automating, optimizing, and empowering teams through great tooling - A habit of leveraging AI tools to move faster, debug smarter, and prototype more effectively - Deep sense of ownership, dedication to delivering ambitious outcomes on fast timelines, and a bias towards action. WHAT WE OFFER: - 401(k) with up to 6% matching - Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance for you and all your dependents (FSAs and HSA plans available) - Free OneMedical membership, telehealth, and virtual mental health services - Commuter benefits & contributions towards ClassPass and Citibike memberships - Unlimited vacation (minimum 3 weeks required) - Quarterly stipend to plan your own party and dogfood the product - Annual team off-sites - Get invited to exclusive parties 🎉 In your application, please include a note on what's got you excited about Partiful! The compensation range for this role is $165,000 - $210,000 depending on years of experience. We're an equal-opportunity employer and strongly encourage applicants from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to apply. We're proud to be a diverse team, and actively work to bring new perspectives to the table.