Staff Engineer, Core Services Platform

Strava

Staff Engineer leading the technical direction of Strava's core social platform services. Building scalable foundations and mentoring engineers to enhance Strava's athlete community.

Posted 4/25/2026full-timeSan Francisco • California • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $225,000 - $278,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCassandraCloudDistributed SystemsDockerGoJavaKafkaKubernetesMySQLNoSQLRedisRubyScala

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Set the technical direction for Strava's social platform services
Act as tech lead for a small pod of engineers
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 inform the roadmap
Own a strategy for technical investment across the social domain
Design, build, and review the systems that back Strava's most-used social features
Mentor engineers on the pod and across the Strava tech team

Requirements

What you’ll need

10+ years of professional backend/server engineering experience
Experience leading technical projects involving multiple engineers
Experience acting as a tech lead
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, Cassandra)

Benefits

Comp & perks

Competitive salary
Offers Equity
Flexible hybrid model
Remote work options

ATS Keywords

✓ Tailor your resume

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

backend engineeringsystem designdistributed systemsRubyScalaGoJavaKafkaKubernetesDocker

Soft Skills

technical leadershipproblem solvingmentoringteam collaborationstrategic planning