Staff Backend Engineer

Bumble Inc.
London
1 month ago
Applications closed

Related Jobs

View all jobs

Staff Engineer (ML-Native / Software Engineering)

Staff Full Stack Engineer

Software Engineer

Senior Product Manager, Credit Platform London (Basé à London)

Senior/Staff Machine Learning Engineer

Data Apprenticeship Coach

Inclusion at Bumble Inc.

Bumble Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and we strongly encourage people of all ages, colour, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and non-binary people, veterans, parents, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent people to apply. We're happy to make any reasonable adjustments that will help you feel more confident throughout the process, please don't hesitate to let us know how we can help.

In your application, please feel free to note which pronouns you use (For example: she/her, he/him, they/them, etc).

Bumble is a global dating and social networking platform with a mission to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable through kind connections. Our Trust and Safety team plays a critical role in maintaining the integrity of our platform, ensuring users feel secure, protected, and respected while interacting with one another. We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced Staff Engineer to join our Trust and Safety group to help shape the future of trust and safety on Bumble.

As a Staff Engineer in the Trust and Safety group, you’ll be the most senior individual contributor, driving the technical direction and solutions for complex systems that ensure the safety and security of our community. You will operate across several teams, collaborating with engineers, product managers, machine learning engineers, data scientists, and other cross-functional stakeholders to build and scale systems that proactively detect and mitigate harmful behaviour and safety risks. Your expertise will help lead high-impact initiatives, and influence best practices across teams within T&S and wider at Bumble. You’ll also play a role in helping to lead and shape the culture of inclusivity and openness.

With technology in the Trust space we’re responsible for complex and meaningful problems including member and content authenticity; detecting and combating toxic behaviour and content whilst encouraging kindness; creating and maintaining support, moderation, and operational tooling; and using a range of technologies including ground-breaking machine learning. We work with a vast amount of data and signals to build out infrastructure intended to support all of Bumble Inc’s brands (Bumble, Badoo, Official, Geneva, and Fruitz). We care deeply about our customer experience, and your work will directly contribute towards keeping people safe.

What you'll do;

  • Act as the most senior individual contributor within the Trust and Safety group, partnering with product and engineering manager colleagues to define and meet our Trust objectives.
  • Work on Trust and Safety’s most challenging and ambitious technical problems, providing leadership, architecture, and decision making, with a focus on building scalable, secure, and high-performance solutions.
  • Design and optimize backend services (primarily in PHP) to handle high-volume data flows, and improve overall system performance, reliability, and security.
  • Working closely with product managers, designers, and other stakeholders such as Operations, CX, Policy, InfoSec (etc) to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
  • Contribute to and maintain a healthy engineering culture through reviewing and improving practices and processes.
  • Where needed, dive into specifics and get hands on with code within teams.
  • Inspire, motivate, and mentor other engineers, including at senior and lead levels, ensuring high standards of code quality, testing, and scalability.
  • Partner with the engineering managers to build a supportive and inclusive culture which values diversity.
  • Support on other activities, such as hiring for our growing engineering team.
  • Horizon scan with technology, stay up-to-date with emerging trends, tools, and techniques in Trust and Safety, and bring new solutions to the team.
  • Representing our work internally and externally.
  • Implement robust security measures and ensure systems adhere to industry compliance standards.

About you;

  • Proven experience as a backend engineer, including at a comparable level of seniority (architectural or technical leadership) for this role.
  • Strong proficiency in PHP or similar backend programming languages, and extensive experience building and scaling backend systems.
  • Proficiency in designing RESTful APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures.
  • Strong understanding of databases (SQL, NoSQL) and distributed systems.
  • Experience with containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) and cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP).
  • Familiarity with monitoring tools and performance optimization techniques.
  • Your ability to rapidly gain an understanding of the architecture of our key systems, and to form an opinion on issues and improvements.
  • Experience of co-owning the technical strategy and roadmap for the area, identifying opportunities and contributing to shaping our roadmap whilst partnering with other engineering leaders.
  • Your skills in architectural design and decision making for complex, ambiguous, and high-sensitivity systems and problem spaces, where you’re able to balance innovation with scalable and iterative solutions.
  • Experience in building relationships across the wider business, contributing back to guilds or similar.
  • Our individual contributors are not expected to balance management responsibilities, but we are looking for someone who'd be able to serve as an inspiring and motivating role model and technical mentor to our engineers (including at senior and lead level).
  • Working with our engineering managers to foster a culture of high quality engineering practices, and ultimately delivery.
  • Working effectively with our wider cross functional partners within key T&S spaces like policy, legal, and operations.
  • Your experience of assessing and mitigating risk.
  • Strong interpersonal and communication skills: You build trust with stakeholders, champion a positive team environment, and ensure clarity in goals and execution.
  • Believer in Bumble Inc.’s brand vision and values.

Preferred;

  • Experience with Trust and Safety-related domains such as content moderation, anti-abuse tools, or online safety.
  • Familiarity with machine learning models used in contexts such as abuse prevention, fraud detection, or content moderation.
  • Experience of working with legislation such as DSA, OSA, RES etc.

Interview process;

  • Initial call with our Talent team.
  • Leadership and impact interview.
  • Technical expertise interview.
  • Final stage with one of our ELT.

About Us

Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble, Badoo, Bumble For Friends, and Geneva. The Bumble platform enables people to build healthy and equitable relationships, through Kind Connections. Founded by Whitney Wolfe Herd in 2014, Bumble was one of the first dating apps built with women at the center and connects people across dating (Bumble Date), friendship (Bumble For Friends) and professional networking (Bumble Bizz). Badoo, which was founded in 2006, is one of the pioneers of web and mobile dating products. Bumble For Friends is a friendship app where people in all stages of life can meet people nearby and create meaningful platonic connections. Geneva is a group and community app for people to connect based on shared interests.

#J-18808-Ljbffr

Get the latest insights and jobs direct. Sign up for our newsletter.

By subscribing you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.

Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

Contract vs Permanent Machine Learning Jobs: Which Pays Better in 2025?

Machine learning (ML) has swiftly become one of the most transformative forces in the UK technology landscape. From conversational AI and autonomous vehicles to fraud detection and personalised recommendations, ML algorithms are reshaping how organisations operate and how consumers experience products and services. In response, job opportunities in machine learning—including roles in data science, MLOps, natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and more—have risen dramatically. Yet, as the demand for ML expertise booms, professionals face a pivotal choice about how they want to work. Some choose day‑rate contracting, leveraging short-term projects for potentially higher immediate pay. Others embrace fixed-term contract (FTC) roles for mid-range stability, or permanent positions for comprehensive benefits and a well-defined career path. In this article, we will explore these different employment models, highlighting the pros and cons of each, offering sample take‑home pay scenarios, and providing insights into which path might pay better in 2025. Whether you’re a new graduate with a machine learning degree or an experienced practitioner pivoting into an ML-heavy role, understanding these options is key to making informed career decisions.

Machine‑Learning Jobs for Non‑Technical Professionals: Where Do You Fit In?

The Model Needs More Than Math When ChatGPT went viral and London start‑ups raised seed rounds around “foundation models,” many professionals asked, “Do I need to learn PyTorch to work in machine learning?” The answer is no. According to the Turing Institute’s UK ML Industry Survey 2024, 39 % of advertised ML roles focus on strategy, compliance, product or operations rather than writing code. As models move from proof‑of‑concept to production, demand surges for specialists who translate algorithms into business value, manage risk and drive adoption. This guide reveals the fastest‑growing non‑coding ML roles, the transferable skills you may already have, real transition stories and a 90‑day action plan—no gradient descent necessary.

Quantexa Machine‑Learning Jobs in 2025: Your Complete UK Guide to Joining the Decision‑Intelligence Revolution

Money‑laundering rings, sanctioned entities, synthetic identities—complex risks hide in plain sight inside data. Quantexa, a London‑born scale‑up now valued at US $2.2 bn (Series F, August 2024), solves that problem with contextual decision‑intelligence (DI): graph analytics, entity resolution and machine learning stitched into a single platform. Banks, insurers, telecoms and governments from HSBC to HMRC use Quantexa to spot fraud, combat financial crime and optimise customer engagement. With the launch of Quantexa AI Studio in February 2025—bringing generative AI co‑pilots and large‑scale Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to the platform—the company is hiring at record pace. The Quantexa careers portal lists 450+ open roles worldwide, over 220 in the UK across data science, software engineering, ML Ops and client delivery. Whether you are a graduate data scientist fluent in Python, a Scala veteran who loves Spark or a solutions architect who can turn messy data into knowledge graphs, this guide explains how to land a Quantexa machine‑learning job in 2025.