Engineering Manager, Machine Learning - Trust & Safety

Bumble is looking for a talented Engineering Manager – Machine Learning to join the Trust ML team and help drive our mission to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable. We’re looking for an ML leader with strong technical understanding, business acumen and proven track record of leading small high-performing teams of data scientists and machine learning engineers. At Bumble, the Engineering Manager role is all about leadership, execution, and delivery - while also contributing to the broader community and shaping our engineering culture!
Trust and Safety is truly at the heart of Bumble Inc.’s mission to create a world where all relationships are healthy and equitable through kind connections. We believe that everyone deserves a safe and comfortable place to make empowered, respectful, and meaningful connections. We think big, as you can see from some of the changes we’re making in the wider world:
- In November 2023 Bumble Inc. became the first business to sign on to an amicus brief in Zurawski v. State of Texas, a groundbreaking lawsuit filed by human rights advocacy nonprofit the Center for Reproductive Rights.- Bumble Partners with The Dialogue To Make the Internet Safer for Women in India- Bumble Backs Law to Ban Cyberflashing in 27 Countries- Bumble releases Open-Source Version of Private Detector A.I.- Bumble’s A.I.-Powered Deception Detector Weeds Out Spam, Scam, and Fake Profiles 
Our technology-related work in the Trust space is a key part of this. 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 leveraging machine learning at their core: with millions of images and messages exchanged on our platform every day, there is a wealth of opportunity to make a real difference in this role and help people to find meaningful connections all over the world!  
We currently maintain several machine learning solutions at internet scale, spanning from content moderation to proactive detection of inauthentic profiles, among the others! We leverage the most modern technological stack in this industry, both from a modelling standpoint (Tensorflow, Pytorch, ONNX) and from a MLOps perspective: we serve tens of thousands requests per second in our GPU-powered Kubernetes clusters!
Some of our posts, if you are interested in deep diving in our stack and infrastructure:
GPU-powered Kubernetes clusters - https://medium.com/bumble-tech/gpu-powered-kubernetes-clusters-7fc6505125cKServe ML deployments - gRPC vs JSON - https://medium.com/bumble-tech/your-next-kserve-ml-service-grpc-vs-json-rest-2e3a512fba9eGitOps for multi-cluster K8s environments - https://medium.com/bumble-tech/gitops-for-multi-cluster-k8s-environments-d305431ba6d6

What you'll do:

• Take the lead in collaboratively designing, delivering and maintaining our machine learning services, in close collaboration with Trust Product Management;
• Collaborate with Machine Learning Engineers and the MLOps Core Team to ensure our architectural choices and tech stack align with the broader tech and product strategy;
• Drive continuous improvement in processes and technology, ensuring the team meets quality standards and delivery commitments while maintaining an inclusive, high-performance culture;
• Create tangible objectives that link team deliverables with overall Group vision in close partnership with Trust Area leadership. Monitor progress and provide visibility to all stakeholders;
• Actively spot dependencies, inefficiencies, or roadblocks, pushing for both short- and long-term resolutions;
• Oversee career development for direct reports, setting clear expectations, providing feedback, and ensuring team members have a clear path for progression;
• Support wider Bumble’s technology team in adopting modern practices and leveraging machine learning to enhance our members’ experience across their entire journey with our products;
• Be an ambassador of Bumble Inc. culture and values, who sets the standards by example!

In the first 12 months you will:

• Start leading in our Trust ML problem space! As part of this, you’ll do all the usual day-to-day line management activities: high quality 1:1s, give regular feedback, work on career development, run performance reviews, create promotion cases. You’ll learn about and be able to support people in a range of different situations and with different needs, including remote working, neurodiversity, and from different backgrounds to you. You’ll watch out for potential for bias in various forms, and proactively work to minimise potential for burnout amongst your team.
• Gain a deep understanding of our business, our members, and the domains we work in, allowing you to use your judgement and ideas to contribute to technology-related decisions. 
• Be accountable for the overall technical delivery in your team, including considering factors (and tradeoffs between) speed, innovation, quality, non-functional requirements, and knowing how your domain contributes meaningfully to company goals.
• Actively form strong relationships and partnerships with your cross-functional leads in product, operations, infrastructure, security and beyond, working together on quarterly roadmaps, headcount needs, prioritisation, processes, and overall strategy.
• Think about the future and how we can use technology as an advantage, whether through technology-relation horizon scanning, commitment to research, use of third parties (build vs buy), minimising bottlenecks, fire prevention (rather than fighting), as well as looking at how you can set up your team through people-related/developer experience system and process improvements.
• Contribute to initiatives in the wider Engineering Manager community, whether that’s locally in Trust and Safety, or more widely.
• Collaborate with other Machine Learning leaders at Bumble Inc. to improve the way we use artificial intelligence to benefit our members and as a competitive advantage for our company. 
• Take part in hiring and other practical activities to help strengthen our overall BumbleTech team

About you and your experience:

• 1-2 years of people management experience in an engineering-driven environment heavily focussed on data science and machine learning; 
• Proven track record of leading successful end to end machine learning projects (NLP, Computer Vision, pattern detection), either directly as a contributor or as a people manager;
• Experience in working cross-functionally in partnership with product and data science;
• Comfortable working in agile or hybrid delivery environments, with a collaborative and adaptable mindset;
• Direct exposure to modern MLOps infrastructures, from training to internet scale GPU inference in multiple regions; 
• Ready to champion and educate others in using machine learning to solve business challenges or customer pain points;
• Able to balance strategic and tactical demands, challenging the status quo and empowering your team to innovate
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills: You build trust with stakeholders, champion a positive team environment, and ensure clarity in goals and execution

Criteria we will be assessing upon:

• Your ability to proactively and positively influence delivery, business acumen, innovation, technical strategy, system health and team health within the Trust ML team and the wider Trust & Safety Group.
• You’ve managed a (potentially small!) but diverse group of engineers and/or scientists and you have started to develop your own leadership to guide people to becoming the best professional they aspire to be.
• Your strong domain understanding and curiosity to explore, understand and improve complex systems serving millions of members daily.
• You know how to (and you don’t take any decision without!) analyse varying data to inform trade-offs and risks, driving a solid experimentation culture.
• Your ability to communicate and collaborate effectively, and how you support others to be great at this too!
• You have a proven track record of shipping and meeting goals, working at the highest quality standards and at the edge of the state of the art.
• You have experience in how to bring a multidisciplinary team together, and work as effectively as possible with partners in Product, Operations and Infrastructure.
• You know how to frame technical challenges within a business context
• You know how to balance Group and individual needs, and can help finding harmony where the two create dissonance.
• You’re able to work with others who may be remote at least part of the time.
• Your values align strongly with the Bumble Inc. values: Growth, Kindness, Equity, Accountability, and Honesty.

Inclusion at Bumble Inc. 
Bumble Inc. is an equal opportunity employer and we strongly encourage people of 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).