Senior Backend (PHP) Product Engineer

About Us

Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess.

We are a team of 700+ fully remote people in 65+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 100M+ chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools to serve the community!

We are a tech company. A gaming company. A content company. And we do it all with passion and commitment to the game. Above all we prize our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, no-corporate culture, and we look forward to meeting you and learning more about what you can bring to the team.

About You

You are a product-minded multidisciplinary engineer who excels at working closely with Product Managers, Designers, and Frontend Developers at every stage of the product development cycle.

You have a high tolerance for technical spec ambiguity during the early phases of product discovery. You cut through complexity while offering simplified solutions that maximize output and future-proofing.

Your holistic understanding of product development and in-depth experience of software engineering principles, such as SOLID, are foundational to your nuanced architectural decisions. Being a naturally unorthodox thinker, you can confidently seek out innovative solutions for recurring development challenges.

You are humble with a sense of humor and don’t take yourself too seriously. You have been working in or dreamed of working in the gaming industry and are ready to turn your talents towards chess!

What You’ll Do

• Work with a multidisciplinary team to design and build the best possible chess experience using the most relevant software engineering principles
• Build and optimize backend systems, scaling for a global top 200 website
• Contribute to technology, architecture, workflow, and design decisions
• Contribute to the backend development team knowledge-base, and mentor junior developers

Preferred Skills

• Multidisciplinary - familiar with many application stacks
• Concise communicator
• Holistic integrator
• Complexity simplifier
• Unorthodox thinker
• 5+ years PHP experience (Symfony preferred)
• Experience with across programming softwares such as MySQL, Git & GitHub, Doctrine, Redis, PHPUnit/PHPSpec, Resque, and Development VMs: Vagrant/VirtualBox
• Excellent understanding of software design and architectural patterns
• Experience with SQL schema design and query optimization
• Experience with command line and Unix systems
• Experience working with a fully distributed team
• Sense of ownership and responsibility
• Chess player
• Lifelong learner

About the Opportunity

• This is a full time or equivalent position
• We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)
• This is open to applicants from anywhere!

You can learn more about us here:

• https://www.chess.com/blog/erik/how-chess-com-s-100-person-virtual-team-works-together
• https://www.chess.com/about

We look forward to meeting you!