Candle

Candle’s mission is to end loneliness.


We are a daily game designed to help close friends and couples stay emotionally connected. Each day, you and someone you care about unlock a shared random challenge. It could be a thoughtful question, a funny debate, a photo or drawing prompt, a mini-game, even a local date idea or activity.

One shared moment a day to laugh, reflect, and grow together.

We envision a world where everyone is paired with the ~8–9 people who matter most in their lives.


In under 10 months, with a full-time team of just three, we're now at:

• 800,000+ users
• $2M+ in annualized revenue
• <8% monthly churn

Technologies We Use:

• React Native (Expo) and Swift UI 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!
• Sample projects of what you could be working on include: overhauling our entire daily notifications setup 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.