About Us

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

We are a team of 400+ fully remote people in 55+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are also growing fast, with more than 90 million players having chosen Chess.com as their online chess home, and a large base of happy premium subscribers.

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 multi-language coder, with especially strong skills in Python. You live at the command line. You bring math and data skills, too, and a great appetite for learning. You have built Unix daemons or microservices. 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!

Big Challenges

• 24/7 operation with globally distributed team and multiple stakeholders
• Ten million games played per day
• Algorithms drive our business: matchmaking, cheat detection, gameplay analysis, player ratings.
• Because chess is a highly quantifiable domain, there are many chess-specific research projects to enhance the user experience, from customized learning tools, to puzzle generation, to human-like bot behavior
• Data: lots of it. Largest, deepest dataset in the industry.
• Our anti-cheat algorithms are used to protect the integrity of high-profile events with cash prizes.

What You’ll Do

• Collaborate with researchers on truly creative projects
• Write and deploy production-strength code embodying our latest research
• Be a leader who teaches best practices for deployability
• Build the next generation of technology supporting Fairplay (detecting chess engine use)
• Engineer at scale using microservices and event-driven distributed architectures
• Be part of a small, supportive, mission-driven team

Preferred Skills

• Strong Python skills
• Comfortable with and interested in math, algorithms and statistics
• Strong collaboration and communication skills for working in a fully distributed team
• Experience with SQL
• Familiarity with testing frameworks and writing tests
• Sense of ownership and responsibility
• Chess player
• Lifelong learner
• Desirable but not required: knowledge of cloud engineering/data-layer technologies such as Redis, Kafka or PubSub

About the Opportunity

• This is a full-time or equivalent position
• We are 100% remote (work 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