What the role involves
What You’ll Do
Ship fast: Own and ship features end-to-end, used by thousands within hours.
Scale infra: Help design and optimize systems that can handle millions of notifications, messages, AI inference at scale, and daily interactions
Optimize performance: Identify bottlenecks, improve reliability, and make Candle feel seamless at scale.
Bring perspective: You’ll work directly with founders and exited founders (Apple, Twitter, NASA engineers, Forbes 30u30 ), contributing new ideas and white boarding solutions to hard problems.
User impact: Every line of code directly affects couples and friends relying on Candle to stay close and stay in touch.
Sample projects of what you could be working on include: overhauling our entire daily notification jobs into a separate reliable microservice, designing and implementing real-time features like a collaborative canvas or a “walkie talkie” feature, creating a recommendation algorithm to dynamically suggest content for couples to explore (this one would be really useful!), etc.
Technologies We Use
- React Native (Expo) and SwiftUI for the client facing app (iOS and Android)
- Convex for the real-time backend (written in Typescript), including all background tasks, queues, cron jobs, and REST APIs
- Anthropic (Claude Opus 4.6), OpenAI (GPT 5.2), and Gemini models to create background agents for tasks like finding local date ideas. We also use Replicate for some image gen models.
- Observability: PostHog for feature flags, Amplitude for analytics, and Sentry for error reporting
- Clerk for user auth(z/n)
- We strongly encourage all candidates to have their own AI setup of choice when coding (Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) to ship faster. Bonus points if you know how to use Git worktrees to speed up your workflow!
Who We're Looking For
- You're a student (or recent grad) excited by viral consumer products and fast shipping cycles
- You have strong experience with TypeScript and mobile frameworks like React Native (Expo). Swift is optional but a plus!
- You get excited by both backend optimization and user-facing polish, whether you’re speeding up a backend query or refining a feature’s UX
- You’re curious, self-driven, and relentlessly resourceful
- Entrepreneurial background, have shipped and published apps before (optional but preferred)
- You want your work to matter, to be visible, felt, and loved by users within hours of writing it
We work hybrid in San Francisco, 3 days a week in person and the remaining remotely. You’ll move fast in this internship, break things, and learn more in a few months than most people do in a year. But if you’re the kind of builder who dreams of taking a product from 800k → 5M users by end of 2026, this will be one of the most exciting chapters of your career.
What they ask for
About Candle
Most relationships, romantic or platonic, don’t end in one moment, they drift apart over time. Missed check-ins, surface-level conversations, busy lives, and routines replace real connection. Candle helps couples and friends stay close through 1-minute daily rituals that bring back presence, play, and curiosity. Candle gives couples and friends a daily, low-pressure game designed to create emotional momentum: the most essential, and often most neglected, ingredient in long-term connection. What started as a swipeable questions game has grown into a full platform and private space for your relationship: - Daily Prompts & Games: Thoughtful, funny, and unexpected questions, couple quizzes, audio and photo challenges that update and adapt monthly - Shared Canvas Widget: Leave notes, doodles, or drawings right on each other’s home screen - Now in beta: Date Ideas Swiping**: Get 60 curated date ideas based on your area (yes, even San Francisco :)), updated weekly. Swipe to match on what you both want to try. From pop-up events to hidden gems, it’s the easiest way to try something new together or even with friends or family! We’d love feedback here! - Streaks & Shared Progress — Build accountability and a shared rhythm - Adaptive Decks: Smarter, more relevant questions over time - Shared Photo Albums & Memories: Keep track of all your photos and logged memories
Full Candle profile