Staff Engineer, Strava
Core Services Platform
$225-278k
Salary varies depending on location. Offers equity
3 days a week in office
Social network for tracking run and cycle routes
Be an early applicant
Social network for tracking run and cycle routes
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$225-278k
Salary varies depending on location. Offers equity
3 days a week in office
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To create the most committed, close, and engaged athlete community on the internet.
Role
Who you are
- 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
What the job involves
- 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
- 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
Our take
Strava has created an online network where runners, swimmers and cyclists can record fitness activities, and compare and compete with their community. It offers both a free and premium subscription service with added features. The company also partners with local councils and urban planners who purchase valuable journey data from Strava which can be used to map out cities and develop safer cycle paths.
The platform helps members discover and plan workouts, as well as offering a leaderboard which is updated using GPS as users compete for the top spot on particular fitness segments.
With over 125 million athletes and growing, Strava released several new product rollouts in 2024, including an AI-enabled leaderboard. A partnership with the wearable fitness tracker Oura will mean Strava software is available on wearables, taking the company into fresh competition with the likes of Peloton and Apple. In 2025, the company secured new funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital, growing its value to $2.2 billion.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-6% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Nov 2020
$110m
SERIES F
Oct 2014
$18m
LATE VC
Total funding: $151.4m
Company benefits
- Competitive base salary & stock options
- 100% company paid benefits for employees and families
- Flexible paid time off
- $2,000 annual professional development stipend
- Paid time off for volunteering
- 401(k) plan - with company matching
- $1000 annual gear stipend
- $500 annual gym or coaching reimbursement
- On-site fitness rooms with showers, lockers, and towel service
- Weekly team workouts – including remote employees
- Safe and secure bike storage on-site
- Weekly all hands meetings
- Employee resource groups
- Anti-racism nonprofit company matching program
- Free lunch on Wednesdays on-site
- Regular team happy hours
- Team offsites and company retreats
- Cell phone reimbursement
- Generous industry discounts on gear and activities
- Race entries to events we sponsor
- Snacks and stocked kitchens on-site
- Strava gear
Company HQ
Mission District, San Francisco, CA
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