Staff Engineer, Core Services Platform

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.