PRESS RELEASE
Media Contact:
Nancy Zakhary / Nicole Sullivan
Brainerd Communicators, Inc.
(212) 986-6667
nancy@braincomm.com / sullivan@braincomm.com
Meet Grindr’s New Chief Technology Officer: Lukas Sliwka
Former VP, Engineering tapped to lead Grindr’s next-gen application architecture and mobile redesign
LOS ANGELES, November 20, 2015 – Grindr, the leading all-male geo-social networking app, today announced the promotion of Lukas Sliwka to Chief Technology Officer (CTO). As CTO, Sliwka is responsible for driving technology innovation and engineering at Grindr. He serves as the catalyst for the team’s agile transformation and is leading the effort to completely redesign Grindr’s global services and mobile client architectures. He joined Grindr in October 2013 as Vice President, Engineering.
“Grindr’s focus is to deliver meaningful, instant connections for our app users. In the last two years, Lukas has played a critical role in driving our mobile innovation journey, while improving the overall Grindr experience for our users,” said Grindr founder and CEO Joel Simkhai. “His technical savvy and creative skill will play an important role in the future growth of Grindr as a top lifestyle destination for contemporary gay men.”
Sliwka helped evolve Grindr into the highly scalable, geo-distributed cloud architecture app that it is today, which supports more than two million active daily users in over 196 countries around the world. Over the past two years, he has been responsible for leading the overhaul of Grindr’s key systems and mobile clients, while helping increase systems stability amid a period of explosive growth in active users. He bolstered the app’s security measures and driving the redesign of Grindr’s platform, while managing a global team of engineers resident both in and out of the U.S.
“As an engineer by training, the opportunity to use technology to connect people in new and dynamic ways has been especially rewarding,” said Sliwka. “Using cutting edge innovation to tackle the challenges of keeping Grindr at the forefront of location-based apps, we’ve also made the company a much more active and attractive career opportunity for technology specialists. I’m particularly proud that in the past two years, we’ve doubled the size of Grindr’s tech team to more than 40 percent of total staff today. That’s a sign of both our commitment to tech, and of the welcoming work environment we’ve developed for tech people in Los Angeles and beyond.”
Prior to joining Grindr, Sliwka served as Senior Director, Engineer for fitness marketer and e-commerce company Beachbody, and as Enterprise Systems Architect for automakers Yamaha and Mazda. He is a graduate of DeVry University.
About Grindr:
Launched in 2009, Grindr is the premier all-male geo-social network that uses location-based technologies to bring together a global community with millions of active monthly users in 196 countries. Grindr also offers a fully loaded, premium subscription-based service called Grindr Xtra. Grindr Xtra strips away all of the banner advertising and gives users increased functionality and enhanced features such as push notifications, the ability to join three Grindr Tribes, unlimited blocks and the ability to see roughly 200 more local guys in the cascade. Grindr is currently available on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Android and BlackBerry models. For more information about Grindr, visit Grindr.com or Grindr.com/Press, like us on Facebook at Facebook.com/Grindr, follow us on Twitter at Twitter.com/Grindr and check us out on Instagram.com/Grindr.
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