Staff Software Engineer - Trust and Safety

At Bumble, our mission is to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable. Trust & Safety is central to that mission – protecting our global community so people can connect with confidence, authenticity, and respect across Bumble, Bumble For Friends, and Badoo. As a Staff Software Engineer in Trust & Safety, you'll set the technical direction for the platform that detects, prevents, and responds to harmful behavior at scale – from reporting, moderation, and enforcement to verification, age assurance, and appeals. You'll operate at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, and AI-powered detection, shaping how we build intelligent, resilient safety systems that protect millions of members every day. The ideal candidate combines deep technical expertise with a strong sense of responsibility for member safety, and makes engineering organizations faster – giving engineers tools that remove friction, standards that ensure consistency, and the encouragement to tackle hard problems. If you want your engineering judgment to directly shape how safe people feel online, we want to hear from you! What You'll Do • Help guide the technical direction for Bumble's Trust & Safety platform, evolving the systems that detect, moderate, and act on harmful behavior for millions of members. Identify the highest-leverage engineering investments across detection, moderation, enforcement, and appeals, while balancing member safety, accuracy, fairness, reliability, and latency. • Lead the design of large-scale distributed systems that power safety capabilities across multiple teams, products, and domains. From real-time signal ingestion and ML-powered detection to enforcement workflows, moderation and investigation tooling, and feedback loops, keep them simple, resilient, auditable, and elegant as threats and the platform evolve. • Drive organization-wide technical transitions across team boundaries, such as the migration of our safety systems to cloud-native services on GCP. Bring clarity to ambiguous architectural decisions and create shared APIs, schemas, and event contracts – with the governance to keep them consistent across dozens of services – that help multiple teams move faster. • Partner with Product, Data Science, Machine Learning, Policy, Legal, and Operations to turn evolving threats and regulatory obligations (such as the EU Digital Services Act and the UK Online Safety Act) into cohesive, end-to-end safety solutions. • Raise the bar for engineering quality through technical leadership. Establish architectural principles, API and schema standards, security practices, observability, operational readiness, and incident response that improve the quality and maintainability of systems where failure directly affects member safety. • Build the paved road for Trust & Safety engineers. Lead foundational investments in service templates, shared libraries, CI/CD, and developer tooling that dramatically shorten the time from idea to a production-ready service, so teams can focus on safety outcomes rather than boilerplate. • Champion AI-assisted engineering across the organization. Drive adoption of AI development tools, build shared agents, integrations, and automated AI reviews into everyday engineering workflows, and ensure AI is applied responsibly – with accurate, transparent outcomes aligned with Bumble's commitment to member safety. • Multiply the impact of other engineers by mentoring senior engineers, influencing technical direction across Trust & Safety and partner teams, and building engineering community through guilds, forums, and training on the organization's most challenging engineering problems. • Remain deeply technical through hands-on contribution. Write and review high-quality code where it creates the greatest leverage. Contribute to critical designs, prototypes, and production code. Rapidly prototype new ideas and serve as a trusted expert for the most critical parts of Bumble's Trust & Safety platform. About You • Typically requires 8+ years of building large-scale backend or distributed systems, with experience delivering complex technical initiatives that span multiple teams. We welcome candidates with alternative backgrounds that demonstrate equivalent skills. • Deep expertise in designing and operating high-scale distributed systems, with strong experience in modern languages such as Go, Kotlin, Java, or similar, and a track record of building reliable production platforms. • A track record of leading organization-wide technical migrations or platform adoptions across many teams and services, including defining the standards, tooling, and governance that make them stick. • Strong understanding of event-driven architectures and large-scale decision systems, and the ability to apply it to detection, moderation, and enforcement – including signal ingestion, rules engines, ML model serving, human-in-the-loop review, and feedback loops. • Experience building cloud-native systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS, or comparable infrastructure, including Kubernetes, containerization, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD, with deep knowledge of scalability, resilience, security, and operational excellence. • Demonstrated ability to define technical strategy and influence architectural direction across multiple engineering teams through expertise, collaboration, and sound technical judgment rather than organizational authority. • Proven experience partnering closely with Product, Data Science, Machine Learning, Policy, and Engineering leadership to translate ambiguous safety and business problems into durable technical solutions. • A track record of mentoring senior engineers, raising engineering standards, and creating leverage by improving systems, tooling, architecture, and the effectiveness of the wider engineering organization – through training, guilds, and engineering forums as well as day-to-day work. • Strong AI fluency, both using modern AI-assisted engineering tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Copilot) and building AI tooling such as agents, MCP integrations, or LLM-assisted code and design review – while applying AI responsibly, evaluating outputs, mitigating risk and bias, and keeping member safety and trust central to every technical decision. Nice to Have • Experience in Trust & Safety, integrity, anti-abuse, fraud, or risk domains at scale. • Familiarity with applying AI/ML techniques to real-world safety or detection problems, such as text and image moderation, content classification, or behavioral anomaly detection. • Experience with API design and governance at scale to ensure rigorous documentation and less friction for teams to integrate with one another. • Experience building developer platforms or shared infrastructure used by multiple engineering teams, such as golden-path service templates, internal developer portals (e.g. Backstage), and standardized CI/CD pipelines. • Experience with security-sensitive or regulated systems – such as secrets management, air-gapped or restricted deployments, age assurance, identity verification, or DSA/Online Safety Act obligations – including auditability, data retention, and privacy by design. • Experience with user-generated content or online-community platforms, or building data analysis and visualization tools for analysts, investigators, or moderators. • Experience building consumer-facing products at scale. BENEFITS & PERKS • Insurance: Medical/dental/vision, 30-day eligibility. Bumble has multiple competitive offerings that will be available to you on the first of the month following date of hire. • Unlimited PTO + 1 company-wide week off + Focus Fridays every week • Fully paid life and long-term disability insurance • 401k with 4% company match if you contribute 6%, 90-day eligibility • Monthly wellness benefit and access to Noom, Unmind, and Your Money Line • Maternity and Fertility benefit + 26 week paid parental leave • Premium App Access About Us Bumble Inc. is the parent company of Bumble Date, BFF, and Badoo. 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) and friendship (BFF). BFF is a friendship app where people in all stages of life can meet people nearby and create meaningful platonic connections and community based on shared interests. Badoo, which was founded in 2006, is one of the pioneers of web and mobile dating products. AI Fluency AI is important to us. We’re excited by people who are curious and experimental, and who think thoughtfully about how AI can amplify their impact and outcomes. We encourage you to use AI responsibly as you prepare your application. Please don’t use it to fabricate experiences or answer questions live in interviews. We care deeply about authenticity and want to understand your real skills, judgment and voice, because building a meaningful, genuine connection with you matters to us. Final Compensation Will be determined based on factors such as the selected candidate’s qualifications, relevant experience, skill set, and other job-related considerations. Inclusion at Bumble Inc. Bumble Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and we strongly encourage people of all ages, color, 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). AI in Bumble Inc. Hiring At Bumble, we may use AI tools to support parts of our recruitment process — such as helping us record, transcribe, and summarize conversations, and supporting job alignment by comparing resumes and job descriptions to highlight skills and potential roles that may be a good match. These tools help us work more efficiently and stay focused on you during our conversations. Importantly, all hiring decisions are made by people. AI is used only to support our team’s efficiency and improve the candidate experience — not to evaluate or decide on your candidacy. Participation in AI-supported interviews and conversations is completely voluntary and will not impact your candidacy. If you’d prefer to opt out, simply let your recruiter or interviewer know at the start of a call, or anytime during the interview or conversation. Summaries and related data are retained only as long as needed in line with our internal data retention policies. If at any point you’d like a transcription or summary deleted, please contact your recruiter directly. Fraudulent Candidate Detection Our applicant tracking system analyzes signals relating to device, IP, email, and phone data associated with each application to protect applicants and our hiring process from fraudulent applications. These signals provide indicators for internal review only and do not constitute a definitive determination of identity or intent. No applicant is rejected, advanced, or otherwise affected based solely on this analysis without human review For further information on how we hold and manage your data, please refer to our Privacy Policy https://bumble.com/en/candidate-privacy-policy.