Staff Engineer, Applied AI

Location: Palo Alto, California; hybrid with in-office collaboration three times per week. Other listed locations: Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.

Salary: USD 225,000–265,000 per year.

Company

hirify.global’s Tinder develops a large-scale dating platform focused on human connection, safety, behavioral science, network economics, and AI.

What you will do

• Own the design and roadmap of the internal agent platform across the gateway, MCP connectors, identity, policy, guardrails, observability, and cost attribution.
• Build agent identity and delegation, including user impersonation, agent-owned identities, scoped credentials, and human accountability for every action.
• Implement fine-grained access control, human approval for irreversible actions, and tool-boundary guardrails against prompt injection, confused-deputy access, data exfiltration, and excessive scopes.
• Provide traces, audit trails, regression evaluations, and per-team cost attribution for agent behavior.
• Set standards for third-party MCP connectors and servers, including onboarding, review, versioning, sandboxing, and safe defaults.
• Operate the production platform and on-call, managing latency, failure modes, rate limits, quotas, kill switches, incident response, and collaboration with Security and platform teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years building backend, infrastructure, or platform systems depended on by other teams, including recent hands-on work with LLM agents, tool use, or MCP.
• Experience shipping identity or authorization systems, including OAuth 2.0, OIDC, token exchange or delegation, service identity, and RBAC, ABAC, or relationship-based policy models.
• Experience operating gateways, proxies, or other services in the critical request path, including on-call, observability, and incident response.
• Strong Python or TypeScript skills and daily use of AI coding tools, with a clear understanding of their limitations.
• An attacker’s mindset for agent systems and the ability to explain why prompt-level defenses are insufficient.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including experience addressing real customer challenges and working with security teams and internal customers.
• A record of turning security constraints into safe solutions for demanding internal customers.

Nice to have

• Experience with policy engines or workload identity.
• Production experience building or operating an LLM gateway, model router, or MCP server.
• Familiarity with OpenTelemetry and tracing for non-deterministic systems.
• Contributions to agent identity or MCP authorization standards.
• Background in application protection, identity and access management, threat detection, or incident response.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time employment with flexible vacation and 10 sick days.
• Health, vision, and dental coverage; 401(k) employer match up to 10%; ESPP.
• Paid parental leave, family-forming benefits, volunteer time, and charitable donation matching up to $15,000 annually.
• Mentorship, access to 6,000+ Udemy courses, and a $3,000 annual professional development stipend.
• Mental health support, concierge medical membership, pet insurance, fitness membership subsidy, commuter subsidy, and a free Tinder Gold subscription.
• Values include ownership, speed, collaboration, candor, safety, and creativity.