Staff Engineer, Product Engineering

About the role

This role is for a Staff Engineer who wants to be close to the product and own the technical systems that power athlete features end to end. You will design, build, and ship backend systems that directly impact what athletes see and experience inside the app. Acting as a tech lead, you will partner daily with product managers and designers to turn ambiguous ideas into working systems from concept to production. You will move fast while balancing reliability, performance, and maintainability across the stack. This position involves mentoring engineers on your pod and influencing technical direction across the organization. You will solve tough problems that span multiple systems and take responsibility for the quality and outcomes of what ships. The role is centered on building the core infrastructure behind user-facing features that motivate millions of active people.

Key facts

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 down problems, coordinating delivery, and guiding technical decisions.
• Partner closely with product managers and designers to take features from 0 to 1, shaping what gets built and how it is implemented.
• Solve complex technical problems and step across the stack into client or adjacent systems when the situation demands it.
• Move quickly on new product bets while maintaining a strong focus on reliability, performance, and long term maintainability.
• Work across Strava's backend stack, including Ruby, Scala, Go, MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, and Kubernetes, and learn adjacent surfaces as needed.
• Mentor engineers on your pod and contribute to the growth of the broader Strava tech organization.
• Navigate ambiguous situations and create clarity for yourself and your team while managing evolving requirements.
• Look around corners to anticipate downstream impacts and make decisions that support future scalability and success.
• Collaborate with product and design partners to prioritize the right work and ensure delivered outcomes meet athlete needs.
• Lead execution on distributed systems that handle scale, ensuring trade-offs are well understood and documented.
• Drive improvements in developer experience and processes that enable faster and safer delivery of features.
• Participate in on-call responsibilities and support production systems with resilience and clear incident response practices.
• Contribute to architectural reviews and long term platform strategy to keep the system robust and adaptable.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional backend or server engineering experience with a track record of shipping consumer products.
• Experience acting as a tech lead and facilitating team processes to drive execution toward outcomes.
• A bias toward building and shipping features, turning ideas into real product in the hands of athletes rather than only designing systems abstractly.
• Strong system design skills for distributed systems at scale, including making architecture decisions and defending trade-offs.
• Proficiency in at least one of Strava's backend languages such as Scala, Go, or Python, with the ability to learn others as needed.
• Comfort working across the full stack and using client code when necessary to unblock features or solve problems.
• Experience with distributed systems technologies like Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, and cloud infrastructure, particularly AWS.
• Hands on experience with relational and NoSQL databases in production, including MySQL, Redis, and Cassandra.
• Resilience in the face of change and the ability to operate effectively in ambiguous situations while creating clarity for others.
• An ability to anticipate future needs and make decisions now that enable success later in the lifecycle of a product or system.
• A strong interest in collaborating with product and design partners to lead prioritization and delivery of meaningful outcomes.
• Experience shipping consumer facing features at scale and understanding what it means to serve real athletes.
• Familiarity with server driven UI patterns is a plus.
• Experience with large scale system migrations, such as moving a critical service from one language or framework to another.

Practical notes

The role follows a flexible hybrid model that requires more than half of the time on-site in the San Francisco office, specifically three days per week. There are no specified working hours, travel requirements, visa conditions, or application deadlines mentioned in the source text. The compensation field is present but no specific figures or ranges are provided, so it is omitted as instructed. The job is open to candidates who match the outlined requirements and are prepared to contribute to building the systems that power Strava's global community of active people.