SoftwareDevelopmentEngineerCo-op(Sept.2026)

Who we are A Thinking Ape builds communities through mobile games with emergent social play and original IP. We released our first game in 2009 and have been profitable and growing every year since. We are a bottom-up driven company with small teams that have a big focus on ownership and data driven decision making. Our portfolio of games are growing. We are scaling our infrastructure and entering new markets to capitalize on this growth and bring our games to more players. Compensation for this position is $6,667 / month. The job As a Software Development Engineer Co-op, you will be helping build our live mobile games, including but not limited to Single City, Kingdoms of Heckfire, and Party in my Dorm, as well as the tools and infrastructure needed to run these massively multiplayer online experiences. You will work closely with artists and designers to help grow our games. You will implement scalable, reliable, and maintainable technologies for both client and server. You will have a major impact on the end product, and will be involved in every aspect of its development. Millions of people will use what you create. We are only considering students who will be enrolled in an accredited degree program in the fall of 2026. What you will do You will be responsible for implementing features, systems, and tools for our games in live operation. The game backends are built with a Django + MySQL server architecture, while the frontend clients are built using Unity or native iOS/Android, depending on the product. You will also: Build entire features from front-end client code to back-end server support. Become involved in every aspect of product development, from design to implementation to playtests to metrics analysis. Construct systems that let everyone at the company deploy to our distributed backend without worry. Create tools to automate and optimize processes across disciplines. These might be adding additional player management tools for our community team, data p