Gym Class - by IRL Studios

Play basketball in virtual reality

Backend Engineer (Senior / Staff / Principal)

$165K - $220K / 0.20% - 0.50%
Location
Austin, TX / Los Angeles, CA / Seattle, WA, US / Chicago, IL, US / Remote (US; CA)
Job Type
Full-time
Experience
6+ years
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Paul Katsen
Paul Katsen
Founder

About the role

Role summary

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

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.

About Gym Class - by IRL Studios

Gym Class is the most popular sports experience in virtual reality - and the best way to play basketball with people from all over the world. Make friends, break a sweat, and become a superstar.

The app is a breakout hit on Quest. With millions of downloads, it's now the #1 most played virtual reality sports game, and #1 best rated experience in the Quest Store.

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

Learn more here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gMJ9hLUAkAe2gv6EdlfkFOFRz-MOi-2INYvGPv-d7LI/

Gym Class - by IRL Studios
Founded:2021
Team Size:8
Location:Los Angeles, CA
Founders
Matthew Harris
Matthew Harris
Founder
Justin Hubert
Justin Hubert
Founder
Paul Katsen
Paul Katsen
Founder