Software Engineering Daily

Tinder is a rapidly growing social network for meeting people and dating. In the past few years, Tinder’s userbase has grown rapidly, and the engineering team has scaled to meet the demands of increased popularity.

On Tinder, you are presented with a queue of suggested people that you might match with, and you swipe left or right to indicate that you like or dislike them. Creating that queue of suggestions is a complex engineering problem. Many factors go into the suggestions that Tinder gives you: geotargeting, food preferences, your favorite band, your photos, and the people you have swiped on in the past.

Bryan Li is an engineering manager at Tinder, and he joins the show to describe the interaction between the mobile client, backend servers, and the offline analytics and machine learning. We also talk about managing different teams and how to reorganize smoothly as a company grows.

If you like this episode, we have done other shows about scaling companies like Uber, New Relic, and Giphy. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS and Android to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. If you don’t like this episode, you can easily find something more interesting by looking at the recommendation engine in the app.

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