Tinder has just announced that it has appointed Hugh Williams, formerly of eBay and Microsoft, to lead the Tinder dev team as VP of Engineering.
Williams comes from Pivotal Software Inc. where he was SVP and led data and application fabric teams. Before that, he was a VP at eBay focusing on user experience, the search engine, big data technologies and platforms. Previous to that Williams worked on Bing at Microsoft.
“I’ve spent a lot of time working on data problems, using large amounts of customer data to iteratively improve a product over time,” said Williams. “That challenge is super important here at Tinder. We want to listen to our customers and make the product even better than it is today. Tinder already has massive scale and is still growing, and being [at Tinder] is an exciting opportunity for someone like me, who loves big complicated distributed systems.”
Tinder is investing heavily in more engineers and product people on the heels of launching Tinder Plus earlier this year.
“The matching part of the app is the primary component today, and there is a lot of blocking and tackling that needs to be done on the messaging side,” said Chris Payne, Tinder CEO. “If I’m honest I think there is a lot to do on both sides, the matching and the messaging. Only then will we start trying to mine the data to facilitate better, easier conversations among users.”
For now, however, Payne cited scaling as the greatest challenge facing Tinder, and believes that Williams is the right man to take billions of swipes and turn them into fine-tuned connections.
Happily married with two children, Williams never saw the reason to start swiping, but did explain that he will be using it far more in the future.
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“The place Tinder started from is connecting people in the dating world,” said Williams. “I think there is an enormous opportunity to connect people for all reasons, and this type of tool is going to become increasingly more relevant to people in all sorts of situations.”
Of course, when asked whether or not Tinder would soon be launching other types of matching (platonic, professional, etc.), Payne simply said to stay tuned.
