Senior Engineering Manager, Internal Platform, Foundation

Strava•San Francisco, CA

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Strava, we invest in the systems which enable our engineering teams to move quickly, safely, and with accountability. As the Senior Engineering Manager for the Internal Platform team, you will set the strategy for Internal Platform and lead the team responsible for building the tools, systems, and capabilities used by all Strava engineers to develop, build, test, deploy, observe, and alert on their software and systems. Your leadership will help the team specialize into two focused pods: Developer Platform and Application Platform. Together, these pods are responsible for the developer tooling which integrates with our CI/CD, telemetry, networking, and other foundational systems, as well as designing and building the base set of protocols, conventions, and common libraries used throughout our Go, Scala, Ruby, and Python backend runtimes. This role is in the Strava Foundation engineering organization, which exists to provide the tools, systems, infrastructure, and support to make Strava technology reliable, scalable, and performant for our athletes. Our org’s work directly enables every product team at Strava to ship features faster and more reliably to millions of athletes worldwide. You'll partner closely with other Foundation, product, and engineering leaders to set the direction for the Internal Platform team, grow the managers and tech leads who will run each pod, and influence how Strava builds software well beyond your direct area.

Requirements

5+ years managing engineering teams, including experience managing senior engineers and, ideally, tech leads or other managers, with a track record of growing engineers into stronger versions of themselves.
Experience setting strategy for a platform, infrastructure, or developer productivity organization and guiding it through a phase of growth or specialization (for example, forming pods, carving scope, or evolving a team's charter).
Strong technical background in platform engineering, developer experience, or foundational services, with the ability to lead architectural discussions and make informed calls on trade-offs.
Demonstrated ability to influence outside your direct area by building partnerships with peer engineering leaders and shaping how other teams work.
Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to paint a clear, compelling vision for a platform team and translate it into concrete commitments.
A customer-centric orientation where the "customers" are the engineers who depend on your team; comfortable running the team like a product team with real users.

Nice To Haves

Experience leading teams that own developer tooling, CI/CD, build and release systems, or telemetry at scale.
Experience leading teams that ship shared application frameworks or libraries, ideally in more than one language (our stack is Go, Scala, Ruby and Python; comparable polyglot experience is fine).
Familiarity with modern cloud infrastructure (AWS), containerization, and Kubernetes.
Understanding of observability tooling (metrics, tracing, logging) and how good telemetry changes how product teams operate.
Fluency with developer productivity metrics and research, and a point of view on which ones are worth measuring at Strava's scale.
Experience partnering with security, SRE, and product infrastructure peers to make platform investments stick.

Responsibilities

Set the strategy for Internal Platform across Developer Platform (developer tooling, CI/CD, telemetry, etc) and Application Platform (shared protocols, conventions and language libraries), and translate it into a roadmap that unlocks every product team at Strava.
Lead, hire, and grow a team of platform engineers through a phase of specialization, including growing tech leads for each pod and, over time, additional managers.
Partner with product engineering leaders and Foundation peers to understand the biggest sources of friction in our development lifecycle and decide what Internal Platform should own, improve, or deprecate.
Drive measurable gains in developer productivity, build and deploy reliability, telemetry coverage, and the quality of our shared application libraries.
Raise the technical bar through thoughtful architectural decisions, clear review practices, and strong operational standards; build a team that takes pride in the systems it runs.
Influence decisions outside your direct ownership area, bringing platform thinking into product team planning, architecture reviews, and cross-team initiatives.
Balance hands-on technical involvement with people management, staying close enough to the technology to make informed architectural calls without becoming the bottleneck.
Be a steward of long-term platform investments, weighing ambitious goals against reliability, cost, and the health of the team.