Staff Engineer (Core Services Platform)

Join Strava, the leading social network for athletes. As a Staff Engineer on our Core Services Platform team, you'll set the technical direction for Strava's social platform services, drive modernization efforts, and mentor engineers. Enjoy a range of benefits, including 100% company-paid benefits, flexible paid time off, and a generous professional development stipend.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• Experience with distributed systems technologies like Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure (AWS)
• Proficiency in at least one of Strava's backend languages (Ruby, Scala, Go, Java) with comfort picking up others
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases in production (we use MySQL, Redis, and Cassandra)
• Experience leading technical projects involving multiple engineers: scoping work, breaking it down, coordinating delivery across a team
• 10+ years of professional backend/server engineering experience, with a track record of setting technical direction
• 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
• Experience acting as a tech lead, facilitating team processes and driving roadmaps
• 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
• We're not looking for 100% coverage on all of these — if you match most of them, we'd love to hear from you: