Backend Engineer

Role summary

Gym Class is the #1 most played sports game in virtual reality, and #1 best rated game on the Meta Quest platform. Millions of players around the world have downloaded GC to play basketball, make friends, break a sweat, and compete to become a star.

As the team’s first backend engineering hire, you’ll take ownership over the design and implementation of our API and its underlying infrastructure. You’ll collaborate with our co-founders, client engineers, and designers across a wide variety of features.

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, love to ship great work that has direct impact on a product and company, enjoy fast feedback cycles from a hungry community, and want to your build your career with a fast-growing startup.

What you'll do

• Own and implement design of API architecture and infrastructure. Will work on areas ranging from: (a) core infrastructure and tooling, (b) recommendation systems, (c) gameplay features, (d) prototyping novel applications at intersection of VR, ML, and streaming.
• Own API quality and uptime.
• Own decisions on when important to ship API for product speed vs. as building blocks for team to move faster.
• Own backend roadmap, informed by collaboration with product, client engineering, and design.
• Drive ongoing backend hiring and team growth.

What we look for

• Products: Has shipped gaming and social features at scale, working with multiple clients (mobile, web, PC, etc).
• Measurement: Experimentation-focused. Has interpreted experiments and their product implications and tradeoffs, determining if work is additive or not. When missing data in past, has built pipelines, designed metrics, and used or implemented A/B testing infrastructure.
• Tooling: Has built tooling for games with networked physics, for streaming media or assets, and handling many concurrent connections.
• Velocity vs. Optimization: Familiar with startup mentality of picking the right infrastructure for the job and stage of company. But when needed, can migrate to more efficient infrastructure (eg - serverless vs. not), refactor, and/or optimize to run more quickly.
• Ideally has built: (a) Recommendation systems for social, matchmaking, and toxicity, (b) Streaming video and audio applications., (c) Apps or games using realtime data in novel ways, (d) Prototypes or products with ML - like generative AI, gaming agents/bots, pose computer vision (eg - pose estimation from video)..
• Should have deep experience with Node, spinning up variety of infrastructure on AWS/Google, and basic React.
• Unity experience is a plus.