geneva (Bumble)

· organisations

lead platform engineer · new york · june 2019 to november 2022.

impact

  • a social messaging app taken from conception to over a hundred thousand daily active users and a twelve million dollar series a.
  • acquired by bumble inc. (nasdaq: bmbl) in 2024 for its technology platform; in 2025 bumble rebuilt bumble for friends on it and moved its own members across.
  • for the people using it: messages in ten milliseconds, real-time updates load-tested to three million concurrent users, and a data platform that lifted retention by thirty percent.
  • for the company: engineering that scaled from seven people to fifty-plus across time zones, shipping a feature one to two weeks faster and deploying a third faster.

the organisation

geneva was the group and community app out of new york: group chats, events and clubs for finding your offline people around a shared interest. backed by coatue, with instagram’s co-founders, michael moritz and patreon’s jack conte among its investors, it raised around thirty-six million dollars. on 20 may 2024 bumble announced it would acquire geneva to take its friendship product from one-to-one to groups; its chief executive, lidiane jones, said the aim was to “accelerate our friendship product using geneva’s powerful technology platform.” the deal closed that summer, and in september 2025 bumble for friends relaunched as a new app built on geneva.

what i did

owned the go and data function.

  • messages arrived in ten milliseconds, on small compute: sixty thousand messages a minute from a single small instance, so the app stayed fast as it grew.
  • everyone in a group saw a message the moment it was sent: redis as the pub-sub back-plane, load-tested to three million people connected at once.
  • nobody missed what mattered to them: notifications fanned out an order of magnitude beyond message volume, from a distributed worker system at sixty thousand jobs a second.
  • the app never slowed under its own popularity: a ring buffer caching five hundred megabytes of database objects per instance, and the thundering-herd mitigations for when a whole community opened it at once.
  • ten-plus features people used every day, from message search to video calls, each event-driven.
  • what people trusted us with stayed safe, and we could prove it: the security controls, a live log pipeline, and behaviour-driven end-to-end tests of the product as people used it.

what it meant

i learned to bring something from concept to series b, and how to navigate the legal, the people and the tech. more than that, i learned that i can fight to the fucking death for a product i believe in, and that when you have momentum and heart like that, nothing can stop the company from succeeding.

i put my whole soul into geneva. we believed in it so much that we worked for free inside of it. i was up to four thousand merge-squashed commits to main a year, each one a different attribute of a feature. i fought to the fucking death to drive this company to success.

geneva is where the standard i hold today was set, and we set it ourselves: a startup inventing its own conventions at the level of the best engineering teams in the world, everything optimised for the company to be lean and for the least cumulative time spent by everyone. it is what i do and deliver since:

  • the hour of thinking that saves the day of coding. the best code is the code not written; a change is composed before i sit down to type it.
  • writing to be read once. a title that says what the change is, two sentences on what it is meant to accomplish, and nothing i could have said with a thumbs up. agreement is silent; disagreement is a conversation.
  • every line reviewed, and the same expected of my reviewers: are there tests, are they clear, is there code we do not need, is there a simpler way. an hour in review saves ten later.
  • tests that drive the design: small functions, pure where they can be, the data fetched outside them. unused code removed, never kept for the day it might be needed.
  • the team’s common spaces, the pull requests, the board, the channels, kept clear: fire and forget, async, concise.

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