Staff Engineer (Product Engineering, Backend)

Join Strava, the leading social network for athletes. As a Staff Engineer, you'll design and ship the backend systems behind athlete-facing features, act as tech lead for a small pod of engineers, and partner closely with product managers and designers. You'll work across Strava's backend stack and mentor engineers on the pod and across the Strava tech team. Enjoy a range of benefits, including 100% company-paid benefits for employees and families, flexible paid time off, and a $2,000 annual professional development stipend.

• Design, build, and ship the backend systems behind Strava's athlete-facing features, owning them from idea to production.
• Act as tech lead for pods of engineers — scoping work, breaking it down, coordinating delivery, and ensuring we are making the right decisions.
• Partner closely with product managers and designers to take features from 0→1, shaping what gets built and how, not just executing a handed-down spec.
• Experience acting as a tech lead — facilitating team processes and driving execution
• Resilience with changes and the ability to navigate ambiguous situations, creating clarity for yourself and others
• An ability to look around corners and predict the future, making decisions now that set us up for success down the line
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases in production (we use MySQL, Redis, and Cassandra)
• A bias toward building and shipping: you've taken features from 0→1 and care about getting real product into athletes' hands, not just designing systems in the abstract
• Proficiency in at least one of Strava's backend languages (Scala, Go, Python) with comfort picking up others, and willingness to work across the stack when needed
• A genuine interest in working closely with product and design partners and leading a 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)
• Strong system design skills for distributed systems at scale: making architecture decisions, defending trade-offs, and thinking about how a system evolves over time
• 10+ years of professional backend/server engineering experience, with a track record of shipping consumer products
• Experience shipping consumer-facing features at scale
• 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 large-scale system migrations (e.g., moving a critical service from one language/framework to another)
• Comfort working full-stack or in client code when a feature needs it
• Familiarity with server-driven UI patterns