Devin Thomson
TINDER - Senior Engineering Manager, Backend Platform
Devin Thomson is a Sr. Engineering Manager at Tinder leading the Backend Platform team, where he owns core backend services and the internal developer platform. His team focuses on distributed systems infrastructure, language runtime and framework management and upgrades, build and dependency management, and tooling.
Devin has a deep background in Java and Nodejs backend engineering, event-driven and streaming architecture, and large-scale migrations and rewrites that keep Tinder’s systems maintainable and performant.
Presentations
At Tinder, modernizing our backend platform means tackling two major challenges at once: the code and the coder.
In this talk, we’ll share how Tinder built its “upgrade muscle” through repeatable, increasingly automated platform initiatives, and how OpenRewrite helped make that possible. We’ll anchor the story in two migrations: our first Java upgrade, which exposed the limits of manual coordination at scale, and our Java 17 + Spring Boot 3 effort — where we leaned hard on automation to keep change boring and predictable.
We’ll then zoom in on the Java 17 and Spring Boot 3 upgrade, starting with a critical testing dependency migration. By authoring a custom OpenRewrite recipe to migrate unit tests from JMockit to Mockito, we refactored thousands of tests across our backend codebase and completed the effort in roughly a month, without widespread manual changes or developer disruption.
We’ll close by showing how OpenRewrite has evolved into a continuous platform tool at Tinder, enabling safe, large-scale refactoring over time. Attendees will learn how to combine deterministic refactoring tools like OpenRewrite with LLMs in a complementary, cost-effective way, and how to apply that approach to build a sustainable, developer-friendly upgrade strategy.