What's It Like to Work at Hinge?

Employees describe Hinge as a place where personal and company values align, creating a stronger sense of connection to their work and colleagues. This alignment helps foster a workplace where people feel supported, authentic and motivated by a shared commitment to how work gets done.

“The Hinge value I resonate most with is empathy. When your personal values and your company's values align—you know it's the right place to work.”

Employees describe Hinge as a workplace that creates opportunities for connection beyond day-to-day responsibilities. Team-building activities and shared experiences help foster camaraderie, strengthen relationships and contribute to a fun, engaging work environment.

“My favorite Hinge moment is when we split up into teams and did an amazing race competition around the office neighborhood!”

How does your team’s work connect to company purpose?

At Hinge, everything we do is in service of helping people go on great dates, so that people can ultimately delete our app. That’s not just one team’s goal. Across the work and systems we build, we’re all asking the same question: What’s the right thing to do for our daters?

For the team working on the core experience, that might mean making it easier to suggest and plan a date, or helping people get to know each other and feel more comfortable meeting in person. The same thinking guides trust and safety, platform and growth, including our approach to monetization as a freemium experience. When we build paid features, we need a clear conviction that they’ll offer meaningful value and help people go on great dates, while keeping the free experience a great way to meet someone.

Because that commitment is shared, engineers, product managers and everyone building here speak up when something doesn’t feel right for daters. We encourage those conversations in Slack threads, tech plans and team meetings. If a feature doesn’t seem like it’s actually helping people, we want to discuss how we can meaningfully help our community of users.

What product decisions reflect your organization’s mission?

Our mission shapes the user experience we optimize for and the metrics that guide our day-to-day product decisions.

A clear example is how we think about our recommendation system. Our goal is to help people go on great dates, so we don’t optimize for engagement or retention. We’re actively trying to reduce the time and effort it takes for daters to safely and meaningfully meet in person. We measure that effort and prioritize features that make our app more effective. 

Additionally, we prioritize safety across our platform. When thinking about the chat experience, we released Are You Sure? — a feature that encourages daters to pause and reconsider before sending a message that could be perceived as offensive. For the receiver of messages, Did This Bother You? checks in with daters about messages that might feel uncomfortable and gives us a better read on what people are actually experiencing. Both features put daters in control of what feels safe to them, instead of solely relying on behind-the-scenes technology. That’s the throughline here: Dates aren’t great if people don’t feel safe getting there.

How do you bring values into day-to-day engineering?

The most important thing for me is modeling our values at every level of engineering leadership. That starts with the bar I hold myself to and shows up in what we expect from leaders and managers, who we promote to staff and senior roles, and what we reward. Whatever we write on paper, people learn from what they see around them.

Of Hinge’s core values — authenticity, courage and empathy — empathy stands out to me as something that makes Hinge special. Our app brings people together, and the way we build these experiences needs to stay deeply human.

For me, empathy starts with curiosity. When I see something I don’t expect or understand, I try to slow down, ask questions and understand what led a team to a decision before judging whether it’s right or wrong. I want to understand their point of view first. That helps us identify gaps in our thinking, including my own, and get to a better decision together.

In day-to-day engineering, that can be as simple as getting around a whiteboard, putting the different considerations and assumptions on the table, and working through them together. We’re building a shared understanding of the principles behind the decision.