Staff Cloud Engineer

Job description

**About the Team:** Grindr is an AI-native platform powering how millions of gay people connect globally. With 15M+ monthly users, 130B+ annual messages, and a team of fewer than 200, we move fast, stay lean, and solve technical problems at a scale few companies ever experience. The Cloud Engineering team builds and operates the infrastructure platform that powers Grindr globally. We own AWS architecture, Kubernetes platforms, infrastructure automation, developer enablement, and the cloud standards that product engineering teams build on every day. As a Staff Cloud Engineer, you’ll help shape the technical direction of Grindr’s cloud infrastructure platform. You’ll partner closely with engineering teams across the company to define scalable infrastructure patterns, improve developer experience, and evolve the systems that support millions of users globally. This is a high-ownership role at a pivotal moment. As Grindr accelerates its AI-native roadmap, infrastructure becomes a strategic advantage — enabling rapid experimentation, global scale, and high-availability systems that serve millions of users every day. At Grindr, we operate in Grindr Mode: moderately hardcore day to day, truly hardcore when it counts. Outcomes over outputs. Smart, driven people who raise your bar, with room to live full lives. This is a hybrid role based in our Chicago office and requires in-office collaboration Tuesdays and Thursdays. **About the Job:** - 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 **Role 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 **You May Thrive in this Role if You:** - Are AI-native or rapidly becoming so — you actively use AI tools in your workflow and continuously explore new operational and engineering use cases - Have 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 **Benefits and Perks:** - **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 **About Grindr:** Grindr is building the Global Gayborhood in your Pocket. With more than 15 million monthly active users, Grindr has become a fundamental part of the gay community and is charting a path to make the world more free, equal, and just. As a public company, we're moving into the next chapter: becoming an AI-native organization that's redefining what's possible for our community. We're embedding AI into our product and operations, moving with startup speed while operating at scale. Everything we do is rooted in impact for our users and outcomes for the business. This isn't social work, it’s impact through excellence. Business success is what gives us the power to serve our community and the seat at tables others can't reach. How we work is defined by Grindr Mode, our operating model that's moderately hardcore day-to-day and truly hardcore when it counts. We think like owners, drive real outcomes, create clarity through action, and push each other to go further than we thought possible. We’re headquartered in West Hollywood with offices in the Bay Area, Chicago, and New York. Our work extends beyond the product through Grindr for Equality, our social impact initiative that's partnered with 100+ community organizations globally to advance safety, health, and human rights for LGBTQ+ people worldwide. We're profitable, growing, and building a team of smart, driven people who bring different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to the work. Want to build technology at a massive scale that serves millions? Come join us! **Grindr is an equal-opportunity employer.** To learn more about how we handle the personal data of applicants, visit our [Employee and Candidate Privacy Policy](https://www.grindr.com/privacy-policy/applicant-privacy-policy/).