In the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, Tinder has some positive news to share around a recent hire. Jerry Heinz, former head of engineering at Amazon for the AppStream product, has recently joined Tinder as VP of engineering, overseeing the team of 30 as the mobile dating app continues to scale.
Heinz led the effort around Amazon AppStream, and before that was the general manager for Test Drive, which was Amazon’s try-before-you-buy feature that let users demo various apps before purchasing them.
“What we needed was someone who has truly seen scale,” said Tinder CEO Sean Rad. “We have an incredibly smart team and they deal with this kind of scale on a daily basis because of how big we already are, but Jerry helps us move a lot faster because we can rely on the knowledge of someone who’s already figured it out.”
Heinz will lead a team of engineers at Tinder to address the speed with which Tinder serves up relevant matches, as well as handling the constant stream of new users as they add more and more data to the network.
“Conducting constant and immediate searches over millions and millions of potential matches and surfacing the best ones is a hard challenge,” said Heinz. “And each new user brings even more content, profile information, and new relationships, so we’re looking to keep the system up and available and the user experience snappy.”
The hire comes at a time when Tinder is under a lot of scrutiny. Setting aside the ValleyWag reports that Benchmark (among others, presumably) is looking to invest between $50 and $75 million into Tinder at a valuation as high as $1 billion.
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