Backend Engineer (Senior / Staff / Principal)

Role summary

Gym Class is the top rated game on the Meta Quest platform (58K ratings, 4.9 stars). Millions of players globally have downloaded GC to make friends, explore social worlds, and compete to become a star. Our community formed around social basketball, and is now rapidly expanding interests and gameplay - including football, baseball, and much more.

As lead for backend engineering, you’ll drive services for VR, Mobile, and Web, collaborate with our cofounders on roadmap, and ship in partnership with client engineers and designers.

The company is backed by top technology and sports investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, National Basketball Association (NBA), the Golden State Warriors, and top player-investors like Kevin Durant, Danny Green, Zaza Pachulia, Andre Iguodala, and Lonzo Ball.

Join Gym Class if you’d like to work at the frontier of social gaming and virtual reality, love to ship company-critical work, get energized from the feedback of a hungry community, and want to grow your career alongside a world-class team.

What you'll do

• Own backend engineering for Gym Class. Your scope stretches across gameplay, core infrastructure, networking, streaming, and prototyping novel applications at the intersection of spatial computing, AI, and more.
• Collaborate directly with our co-founders on roadmap, building a deep understanding of customers, and shipping work that touches everything at the company.
• Start by running experiments to improve our spatial menu system (React/Node) and mobile companion app (React Native/Node).
• When ready to take on bigger outcomes, drive backend hiring and growing your squad.

What we look for

• Shipped at Scale: Has shipped to millions, across Mobile and Web, in consumer social, gaming, and startups.
• Bias for Action: Dives into what’s most critical for the company. Natural curiosity to learn skills needed to unblock themselves, even if it extends beyond their core specialty.
• Product Sense: Experience designing, shipping, and interpreting hypothesis-driven experiments and features. Builds intuition for product implications and tradeoffs, and when additional data is needed, implements metrics to build further understanding.
• Infrastructure: Shipped production applications in Node, React, React Native, Kubernetes, and running infrastructure on AWS.
• Velocity vs. Optimization: Familiar with startup mentality of picking the right tool for the job given what’s most important for the company.
• Nice to have areas of experience: (a) consumer social recommendation and moderation systems, (b) streaming/storing/querying large sets of time series data, (c) streaming video and audio applications, (d) deploying and running large computer vision models.
• Nice to have tooling experience: Unity.

PAY AND BENEFITS

• Salary ranges may be inclusive of several career levels and will be narrowed during the interview process based on a number of factors, including the candidate’s experience, qualifications, and location.
• Additional benefits for this role include: equity; and medical, dental, and vision benefits.