It’s a match!
Tinder is opening a Silicon Valley office and plans to double its workforce in the next 18 months
Tinder is coming to Silicon Valley to recruit.
Asa Mathat
After spending its first four years exclusively in West Hollywood, Tinder is opening its first office in Silicon Valley so that it can better recruit employees with hard-to-find tech skills, says CEO Sean Rad. A lot of those people funnel in and out of other Bay Area tech giants like Facebook and Google and Apple, he added.
“I would say 50 percent of it is [finding] talent that’s worked on very large-scale systems and infrastructures out of Google or Facebook or whatnot,” Rad said in an interview with Recode. “The other 50 percent we can’t really talk about, but there are some fun things we’re working on.”
Rad did mention “machine learning and neural networking” as areas of interest, specifically referencing the company’s recent smart photos algorithm meant to determine which of your Tinder photos is the most likely to result in a match. Google and Facebook, for example, have some of the largest machine learning teams in the world.
The new office won’t replace Tinder’s headquarters, but it won’t be just a co-working space either. Tinder, which lets people swipe through user profiles to find potential dates, has roughly 200 employees, with plans to double in size over the next 12 to 18 months, Rad said.
The new Palo Alto office will be a relatively small part of that growth. Tinder has already hired 20 people for the office, and Rad says the company will probably add about 20 more people in Silicon Valley over the next year or so.
“It was supposed to be just a small satellite office,” Rad said. “We’ve already outgrown it, and we’re already looking at expansion plans in Palo Alto.”
Tinder isn’t the only Southern California company looking for a recruiting foothold in Silicon Valley. Snapchat also opened its first San Francisco office even though CEO Evan Spiegel has long resisted Silicon Valley’s tech-heavy culture.
Fun fact about Tinder’s new office at 471 Emerson Street: It was one of Facebook’s earliest offices, too.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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