Cloud Engineer at Chess

About Chess.com

Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the top platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess. Our team consists of over 600 fully remote individuals across more than 60 countries, dedicated to serving the global chess community. We support over 250 million chess players worldwide with an outstanding product, content, and tools. We are a tech company, a gaming company, and a content company, driven by passion and commitment to the game. Our culture is mission driven, flat, life celebrating, and free of corporate bureaucracy.

About the Cloud Engineer 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 demands, including managing more than 1 million CPUs across dozens of regions.
• Run and evolve our private Kubernetes cloud on bare metal: a Rancher managed fleet in our own data centers that handles 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 as the 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!).

You can learn more about us here:

• Chess Is For Everyone!
• Our Values