Staff Engineer, Product Engineering (Backend)

ABOUT STRAVA Strava is the app for active people. With over 200 million athletes in more than 185 countries, it’s more than tracking workouts—it’s where people make progress together, from new habits to new personal bests. No matter your sport or how you track it, Strava’s got you covered. Find your crew, crush your goals, and make every effort count. Start your journey https://www.strava.com/subscription with Strava today. Our mission is simple: to motivate people to live their best active lives. We believe in the power of movement to connect and drive people forward. ABOUT THIS ROLE Strava's Product Engineering teams build the features athletes use every day. We're looking for a Staff Engineer who wants to be close to the product — shipping athlete-facing features, turning ambiguous ideas into working systems, and acting as tech lead for a small pod of engineers. This is a builder's role first. You'll spend your time designing and shipping the technical systems that power user facing products, partnering daily with product managers and designers to take features from 0→1, and setting the technical direction for your pod along the way. You'll move fast, work across the stack when the problem calls for it, and own the quality of what ships. We follow a flexible hybrid model that translates to more than half of your time on-site in our San Francisco office — three days per week. WHAT YOU'LL DO - 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 0→1, shaping what gets built and how, not just executing a handed-down spec. - Solve tough technical problems and lead the pod to execute, stepping across the stack into client or adjacent systems when the problem calls for it. - Move quickly on new product bets while keeping an eye on reliability, performance, and maintainability. - Work across Strava's backend stack — Ruby, Scala, Go, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, and Kubernetes — and pick up adjacent surfaces as needed. - 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 shipping consumer products. - Experience acting as a tech lead — facilitating team processes and driving execution. - 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. - Strong system design skills for distributed systems at scale: making architecture decisions, defending trade-offs, and thinking about how a system evolves over time. - 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. - 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). - 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. - 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. 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 shipping consumer-facing features at scale. - Comfort working full-stack or in client code when a feature needs it. - Familiarity with server-driven UI p…