Staff Engineer, Core Services Platform

ABOUT STRAVA Strava is the app for active people. With over 200 million athletes in more than 185 countries, it’s more than tracking workouts—it’s where people make progress together, from new habits to new personal bests. No matter your sport or how you track it, Strava’s got you covered. Find your crew, crush your goals, and make every effort count. Start your journey https://www.strava.com/subscription with Strava today. Our mission is simple: to motivate people to live their best active lives. We believe in the power of movement to connect and drive people forward. ABOUT THIS ROLE Strava's Core Services Platform teams build the scalable foundations behind the features athletes use most. We’re hiring for teams which build the foundational technology behind Strava features like the feed and photo/video sharing, as well as capabilities like experimentation and notifications. We're looking for a Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for this domain and act as tech lead for a small pod of engineers. This is a role for someone who wants to own the technical vision for how Strava's social features work under the hood. You'll drive major modernization efforts across critical services, partner with product teams to ensure platform capabilities are ready when they need them, and shape how we approach social platform development for years to come. We follow a flexible hybrid model that translates to more than half of your time on-site in our San Francisco or Denver office — three days per week. WHAT YOU’LL DO: - Set the technical direction for Strava's social platform services and build the roadmap that balances long-term architectural investments with near-term product delivery. - Act as tech lead for a small pod of engineers, facilitating team processes like quarterly planning, sprint ceremonies, and cross-team coordination. - Solve tough technical problems and lead small teams to execute those solutions, even if it means stepping outside your usual domain. - Drive modernization and migration efforts for critical platform services, evolving our stack to meet the needs of the product roadmap and Strava's growing athlete base. - Partner with product teams to inform the roadmap to proactively identify upcoming needs and have the right capabilities available at the right time. - Own a strategy for technical investment across the social domain, ensuring critical services meet reliability, performance, and cost standards. - Design, build, and review the systems that back Strava's most-used social features, working across Ruby, Scala, Go, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, and Kubernetes. - Mentor engineers on the pod and across the Strava tech team. WHAT YOU’LL BRING TO THE TEAM: - 10+ years of professional backend/server engineering experience, with a track record of setting technical direction. - Experience leading technical projects involving multiple engineers: scoping work, breaking it down, coordinating delivery across a team. - Experience acting as a tech lead, facilitating team processes and driving roadmaps. - Strong system design skills for distributed systems at scale: making architecture decisions, defending trade-offs, and thinking about how a system needs to evolve over multiple years. - Proficiency in at least one of Strava's backend languages (Ruby, Scala, Go, Java) with comfort picking up others. - Experience with distributed systems technologies like Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure (AWS). - Experience with relational and NoSQL databases in production (we use MySQL, Redis, and Cassandra). - A genuine interest in leading the team to prioritize the right work, and deliver it well. You’re interested in more than just putting your head down on an assigned project. We're not looking for 100% coverage on all of these — if you match most of them, we'd love to hear from you: - Experience with feed systems, social graphs, or recommendation/ranking systems. - Experience with large-scale system migrations (e.g., moving a critical service from one language/framework to another). - Familiarity with server-driven UI patterns. For information on benefits, please click here https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTkFMPz3eCjd0FgQ28VWnK4d2BEnzGyaSFGwATR-dQdBb9HxZgay6kboqnT0-V-qaBDzSvYIzI76vT5/pub. WHY JOIN US? Movement brings us together. At Strava, we’re building the world’s largest community of active people, helping them stay motivated and achieve their goals. Our global team is passionate about making movement fun, meaningful, and accessible to everyone. Whether you’re shaping the technology, growing our community, or driving innovation, your work at Strava makes an impact. When you join Strava, you’re not just joining a company—you’re joining a movement. If you’re ready to bring your energy, ideas, and drive, let’s build something incredible together. Strava builds software that makes the best part of our athletes’ days even better. Just as we’re deeply committed to unlocking their potential, we’re dedicated to providing a world-class, inclusive workplace where our employees can grow and thrive, too. We’re backed by Sequoia Capital, TCV, Madrone Partners and Jackson Square Ventures, and we’re expanding in order to exceed the needs of our growing community of global athletes. Our culture reflects our community. We are continuously striving to hire and engage teammates from all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives because we know we are a stronger team together. Strava is an equal opportunity employer. In keeping with the values of Strava, we make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight. We will ensure