Staff Backend Engineer - Platform

About us

In the last few years, remote and hybrid work has had an explosion in popularity, giving workers an unprecedented level of access to opportunity and an increase in quality of life. However, our existing tools were not set up to do remote work well. Work can be isolating, transactional, and void of the camaraderie that makes everyone feel like they’re in it together.

To solve this, Gather builds virtual offices that bring the best of in-person work to remote. We’ve already seen success with our approach, with over 10,000 remote-first companies using our spaces every day. 

And yet it’s still the early days for our broader vision of the Metaverse. We’re excited about how the Metaverse can break down physical constraints that exist today, not just in where you can work, but which friends/family you can see, or what educational opportunities you can have access to. 

Join us in this mission!

Role overview:

Backend Engineers at Gather design and implement the complex systems that underlie what is simultaneously a live video chat platform, multiplayer game, and modern web app. The thoughtful design of the foundation that everything is built upon is essential not only to support the current feature set and usage of Gather but also to allow for rapid experimentation with future directions and to scale to the next million Gather users.

Take ownership the Gather Platform and design a mature, scalable and reliable set of services that tie together our game engine, audio/video systems, and app-driven virtual spaces!

Where you will make an impact:

• Performance tune the game service to support thousands of users per space
• Build (and secure) a web socket API that enables anyone to enhance Gather with their own arbitrary game logic
• Expand the expressiveness of objects and build the first few examples (think levers which cause [anything], projectiles, sounds, etc)
• Improve the reliability, scalability, and performance of the video system through better architecture, testing, and monitoring
• Rearchitect the game service to be stateless and massively parallelized
• Build a plugin system that allows anyone to use community-created add-ons

What you bring:

• Demonstrated excellence in distributed systems fundamentals
• 5+ years of experience shipping systems and infrastructure components at a great scale
• Experience working with Typescript and NodeJS
• A keen intuition for well-designed software and well-written code
• Intrinsic motivation and the drive to own and solve difficult problems without guidance
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with technical leadership abilities
• A healthy tolerance for the chaotic balance between Doing Things Right and iterating and shipping quickly

Gather is committed to building an inclusive and equitable workplace for individuals of all backgrounds. We strive to build a workplace where employees feel comfortable bringing their authentic selves to work, everyday. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy or parental status, protected veteran status, disability status, or any other basis prohibited by law. Additionally, we're committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities in employment. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please notify the recruiter you are working with. We also ask that all applicants consider answering the voluntary demographic questions on our job application to help us track the inclusivity of our recruiting efforts and programs. Answering these questions is entirely voluntary and your answers will not be shared with the hiring team and will not impact the hiring decision.