Engineering Love Stories: Behind the Scenes of Tinder's Quality Practices
Jun-young Kwak (Sr. Director, Engineering), and Priyanka Halder (Sr. Leadership, QA & Release) will delve into the fascinating journey of Tinder’s quality engineering over the past decade, highlighting the dynamic evolution and innovative strategies that have underpinned the platform’s success in connecting millions worldwide. The talk traces the early days of experimentation with various quality assurance models, both in-house and outsourced, reflecting on the lessons learned and the pivotal decisions that shaped the future of quality at Tinder. A significant milestone in this journey was the strategic partnership with the developer experience team, which fostered a culture of collaboration and efficiency, crucial for Tinder’s rapid expansion to over 190 countries and adaptation to 45+ localizations. This global growth brought its own set of challenges, from navigating the complex web of international compliance requirements to ensuring a universally high-quality user experience across diverse cultural landscapes. The narrative also explores how Tinder leveraged artificial intelligence to enhance safety and create a more secure environment for its members, showcasing its commitment to innovation and member satisfaction. Through this journey, “Engineering Love Stories” offers an insider’s view into the meticulous work and creative solutions that have enabled Tinder to continue writing love stories around the globe.
Jun-young Kwak is a Senior Director, Engineering at Tinder. He currently oversees the Integrity engineering team to make Tinder the safest place to meet new people, and manages part of the Foundations engineering team, which enables other teams to deliver meaningful and exciting changes to members with quality and speed. Prior to Tinder, he worked on 1) building a seamless data pipeline for training models and predicting risks while supporting various machine learning algorithms and 2) building big data-driven scalable and robust distributed systems. Jun-young completed his PhD from the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California, specializing in Artificial Intelligence. Prior to that, he completed his masters degree from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and undergraduate education at Seoul National University, Korea.
With an extensive background spanning over 15 years in software quality assurance, Priyanka Halder is a certified leader deeply committed to steering large-scale quality engineering, automation, and compliance projects within global multi-billion-dollar organizations. Holding a Master of Science in Computer Science from California State University, Long Beach, along with a certificate in Mobile Application Development from UCLA, her academic prowess underpins her professional expertise. Currently at the helm of Tinder's Quality & Release Engineering team, Priyanka excels in founding, guiding, and cultivating teams across QA, platform, DevOps, and compliance sectors. This leadership is not only pivotal in launching teams from the ground up but also in consistently delivering superior products and services across diverse industries. She is a trusted advisor to various Series A and B companies within the quality engineering field. As a regular keynote speaker and panelist at industry conferences and webinars, she disseminates her knowledge and insights on topics such as quality engineering leadership, automation testing, and test planning.