Staff Engineer, Core Services Platform

The role

A Staff Engineer will set technical direction and act as tech lead for a small pod of engineers. You will build and modernize the scalable foundations for social features like the feed, photo/video sharing, experimentation, and notifications.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for social platform services and build the roadmap.
• Act as tech lead for a small pod of engineers.
• Facilitate team processes like quarterly planning, sprint ceremonies, and cross-team coordination.
• Solve tough technical problems and lead small teams to execute solutions.
• Drive modernization and migration efforts for critical platform services.
• Partner with product teams to identify upcoming needs.
• Own a strategy for technical investment across the social domain.
• Design, build, and review systems using Ruby, Scala, Go, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, and Kubernetes.
• Mentor engineers on the pod and across the tech team.

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of professional backend/server engineering experience.
• Experience leading technical projects involving multiple engineers.
• Experience acting as a tech lead, facilitating team processes and driving roadmaps.
• Strong system design skills for distributed systems at scale.
• Proficiency in at least one of Strava's backend languages (Ruby, Scala, Go, Java).
• Experience with distributed systems technologies like Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases in production (MySQL, Redis, and Cassandra).
• Interest in leading the team to prioritize the right work and deliver it well.

Nice to have

• Experience with feed systems, social graphs, or recommendation/ranking systems.
• Experience with large-scale system migrations.
• Familiarity with server-driven UI patterns.

About the company

Strava is the app for active people with over 200 million athletes in more than 185 countries. Its mission is to motivate people to live their best active lives.