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 200M+ 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 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