About the role
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 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 250M+ 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 The Role
The Cloud Engineer role is critical to scaling Chess.com's infrastructure to support millions of daily chess games and serve global users. This position combines site reliability engineering expertise with cloud infrastructure management, directly impacting system performance, reliability, and scalability across Chess.com's multi-regional distributed architecture. The role requires deep technical expertise in both infrastructure automation and application optimization to maintain Chess.com's position as a high-traffic gaming platform while enabling rapid feature development and deployment.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
Architect and optimize cloud-native infrastructure using Kubernetes, Terraform, and GitOps tools to support millions of concurrent chess games across multiple global regions
Lead performance optimization initiatives by analyzing Golang and TypeScript codebases to identify and resolve bottlenecks at scale, with specific focus on chess programming optimizations
Design and implement multi-regional resilient systems capable of handling extreme scale challenges including managing 1 million+ CPUs across dozens of regions
Run and evolve our private Kubernetes cloud on bare-metal: a Rancher-managed fleet in our own datacenters that carries compute and IO intensive workloads, operated as one platform with GKE regions, with workloads placed wherever they get the best cost and performance.
Execute incident response and operational excellence serving as primary technical resource for critical infrastructure issues, ensuring rapid resolution and minimal downtime
Develop high-performance integration patterns for distributed systems handling extensive data volumes while maintaining reliability and scalability targets
Collaborate with development teams to implement cloud service integration best practices and optimize application deployment architectures
Implement Infrastructure as Code practices using Terraform to manage all cloud resources, ensuring consistent, automated, and scalable deployment processes
Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with GitOps approaches using tools like ArgoCD to enable rapid, reliable software delivery
Monitor and enhance system observability through implementation of modern monitoring stacks including Prometheus, Mimir, ES, Vector and Tempo
Qualifications
7+ years of experience managing large-scale, cloud-native distributed systems with proven ability to handle high-traffic production environments
Expert-level proficiency with Kubernetes including cluster deployment, management, and advanced orchestration patterns
Advanced Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform for managing complex cloud and Kubernetes resources in production
Strong programming skills in Golang with demonstrated ability to optimize high-performance services and troubleshoot complex codebases
Deep understanding of distributed systems design including failure modes, architectural principles, and data modeling strategies
Extensive experience with major cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) including advanced services, networking, and cost optimization
Proficiency with GitOps and CI/CD methodologies using modern deployment automation and continuous integration practices
Hands-on experience with observability tools including metrics, logging, and distributed tracing systems for high-scale environments
Strong Linux systems administration skills with deep knowledge of system internals and performance optimization
Excellent collaboration and communication skills for working effectively in globally distributed teams
Preferred Skills and Qualifications
Chess programming and optimization experience including bit-level manipulations and performance tuning for gaming applications
TypeScript development experience for full-stack infrastructure and tooling development
Service mesh implementation experience particularly in hybrid multi-cloud and bare-metal environments
Message broker expertise with systems like Kafka, PubSub, and Redis for event-driven architectures
Gaming industry experience with understanding of real-time systems and high-concurrency requirements
Experience with Google Cloud partnerships and direct collaboration with cloud provider engineering teams
C/C++ programming experience for low-level system optimizations
Advanced networking knowledge for multi-regional infrastructure and hybrid cloud connectivity
Experience managing bare-metal infrastructure and integrating with cloud-native services
Database performance optimization experience with large-scale data systems and indexing strategies
About the Opportunity
This is a full-time opportunity
We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)
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You can learn more about us here:
Chess Is For Everyone!
Our Values
Originally posted on Himalayas
