Staff Engineer, Core Services Platform
About The Position
Strava’s Core Services Platform teams build the scalable foundations behind commonly used athlete features, including the feed and photo/video sharing, as well as capabilities such as experimentation and notifications. The Staff Engineer sets the technical direction for this domain and acts as tech lead for a small pod of engineers. The role owns the technical vision for Strava’s social features, drives modernization across critical services, partners with product teams to prepare platform capabilities for upcoming needs, and shapes the long-term approach to social platform development. The position follows a flexible hybrid model, with more than half of working time on-site in Strava’s San Francisco or Denver office—three days per week.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional backend/server engineering experience, with a track record of setting technical direction.
- Experience leading technical projects involving multiple engineers, including scoping work, breaking it down, and 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, including making architecture decisions, defending trade-offs, and planning for how systems evolve over multiple years.
- Proficiency in at least one backend language used at Strava (Ruby, Scala, Go, or Java), with comfort learning others.
- Experience with distributed systems technologies such as Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
- Production experience with relational and NoSQL databases; Strava uses MySQL, Redis, and Cassandra.
- Interest in leading a team to prioritize the right work and deliver it well, beyond simply focusing on an assigned project.
Nice To Haves
- Experience with feed systems, social graphs, or recommendation/ranking systems.
- Experience with large-scale system migrations, such as moving a critical service from one language or framework to another.
- Familiarity with server-driven UI patterns.
Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for Strava’s social platform services and build a roadmap balancing long-term architectural investment with near-term product delivery.
- Act as tech lead for a small pod of engineers, facilitating quarterly planning, sprint ceremonies, and cross-team coordination.
- Solve challenging technical problems and lead small teams in executing solutions, including work outside the usual domain.
- Drive modernization and migration efforts for critical platform services to support the product roadmap and Strava’s growing athlete base.
- Partner with product teams to identify upcoming needs and ensure platform capabilities are 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 systems behind Strava’s most-used social features, working across Ruby, Scala, Go, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, and Kubernetes.
- Mentor engineers on the pod and across Strava’s technology team.
Stand Out From the Crowd
Upload your resume and get instant feedback on how well it matches this job.
What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
