Engineering Internship, Backend

About You

You love chess and want to help bring it to players around the world. You’re curious, creative, and eager to learn from a team that’s building the future of online chess. This internship is a chance to grow your backend skills, contribute to real services used by millions, and collaborate with teammates who care about reliable systems, clean code, and a great developer and user experience.

You naturally resonate with a mix of the following qualities and are eager to learn how they can serve as the foundation for your career:

• Multidisciplinary: You’re comfortable switching between adjacent domains (APIs, data stores, infra) as needed.
• Resilient: You can handle ambiguity and iterate during early discovery and architectural exploration.
• Ability to Simplify: You distill complex systems into clear, maintainable designs and pragmatic solutions.
• Agile: You focus on impact, shipping incrementally while keeping an eye on future scale.
• Holistic: You see how services, data, and infrastructure fit together to meet product and company goals.
• Unorthodox: You’re willing to try creative approaches to performance, reliability, and scaling constraints.
• Logical Intuition: You balance rigorous reasoning (metrics, logs, tests) with informed judgment and instincts.

What You'll Do

• Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team to design and build the best possible chess experience using modern technologies.
• Develop and optimize backend systems to support a global, top-200 website at scale.
• Participate in technical discussions around architecture, workflows, and design decisions.
• Contribute to team documentation and help strengthen the backend knowledge base.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with general-purpose programming languages (PHP preferred)
• Familiarity with modern web application frameworks (Symfony or Laravel preferred)
• Strong understanding of relational databases (MySQL preferred)
• Chess player
• Sense of ownership and responsibility
• Excellent communicator and team player
• Degree-seeking student currently enrolled at a college or university or equivalent bootcamp
• Strong collaboration and communication skills working in a fully distributed team
• Sense of ownership and responsibility

About the Opportunity

• This is a paid internship opportunity
• We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)
• This role is open to candidates who can work in the United States or Canada

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You can learn more about us here:

• https://www.chess.com/article/view/how-chess-com-virtual-team-works-together
• https://www.chess.com/about