Staff Software Engineer - Trust and Safety

Role details

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 mo