Quick Summary
About Chess.com
Chess.com is recognized globally as one of the largest gaming sites and the premier platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. We are a fully remote team of over 600 people across 60+ countries, dedicated to serving the global chess community of 200M+ players with exceptional products, content, and tools.
We operate as a tech company, a gaming company, and a content company, driven by passion and commitment. Our culture is mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, and non-corporate.
About the Role: Senior Solutions Engineer
We seek an experienced full-stack engineer skilled in building, releasing, and maintaining applications for millions of users. You must possess practical knowledge across the entire stack, including infrastructure, databases, DevOps, backend, and frontend development. You apply best practices and patterns to ensure high-quality delivery and velocity.
AI-First Engineering Mindset
You have evolved beyond traditional development into an AI-first engineering mindset. While grounded in deep practical understanding of software and production systems, you are highly skilled in agentic orchestration. You integrate agents into your core workflow, supervising them to focus on high-impact architectural decisions, security, and scalability. You understand that clean code and design patterns are crucial for maintaining clear context and an AI-friendly codebase.
You are a collaborative team player who enjoys sharing wisdom and creativity. A passion for coding and building software is essential. Experience playing chess or a desire to learn is valued.
Our Technology Stack and Infrastructure
- Backend: PHP 7.4+ and PHP 8.3+ (Slim and Symfony frameworks).
- Frontend: TypeScript / JavaScript (React, Vue.js, some jQuery).
- Databases: MySQL, Elastic Search, Redis.
- Communication: RPC and REST APIs, Kafka (cross-service bus), RabbitMQ (internal queuing), Websockets.
- DevOps/Containerization: Docker / Orbstack, Kubernetes, ArgoCD.
- Quality & DX: PHPStan, Psalm, PHPUnit, Playwright, PHPCSFixer.
- Version Control: Git (Bitbucket and GitHub).
- Observability: Kibana, Sentry, DataDog, Stackify, Blackfire (performance profiling).
- AI Support: Cursor / Claude / Junie for operations support.
What You'll Do
- Collaborate with experienced engineers to build new functionalities and maintain existing systems.
- Contribute significantly to technology and architecture decisions for new solutions.
- Engage with awesome, mission-driven colleagues and drive the growth of Chess.com.
Preferred Skills & Experience
- Experience with PHP 7.4+ and at least two popular PHP frameworks.
- Proficiency with MySQL or other relational databases.
- Experience with ElasticSearch, SOLR, MongoDB, or other popular NoSQL databases.
- AI-first mindset & Prompt Engineering expertise.
- API-first design proficiency, architecting RPC, RESTful, or GraphQL APIs.
- Familiarity with message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Redis Pub/Sub, Amazon SQS).
- Performance profiling and code debugging, using tools like XDebug or Blackfire.
- CI/CD orchestration, including baking automated testing and static analysis (PHPStan / Psalm) into deployment pipelines.
- Strong understanding of programming good practices and design patterns.
- Excellent collaboration and communication skills in a fully distributed team environment.
- Demonstrated sense of ownership and responsibility.
- Chess player or enthusiast.
- Commitment to being a lifelong learner.
About the Opportunity
This is a full-time, 100% remote opportunity (work from anywhere!).
Learn more about us here:
https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-chess-com-virtual-team-works-together
https://www.chess.com/about