What are the responsibilities and job description for the API & Platform Engineer position at Strava?
About The Role
Strava is the leading social platform for athletes and the largest sports community in the world, with over 85 million athletes in 195 countries. If you sweat you’re an athlete, and Strava’s mobile apps and website connect millions of active people every day!
This role is on the Strava Foundation Team, the team that builds and maintains the platform upon which the Strava backend runs. Strava users upload roughly 40 million activities per week, for a lifetime total of over 5 billion activities handled by the platform and infrastructure that the Foundation Team maintains.
We are a team with a diverse skill set who work together on the common functionality, libraries, and tools that make up the Strava service platform. The service platform is used by all engineers at Strava for developing user features. Engineers on the Foundation Team work on a very wide variety of projects and technologies; recent projects have included extracting authentication logic to a microservice, creating our federated GraphQL infrastructure, and building an updated approach to rate limiting in our API.
You’re excited about this opportunity because you will:
- Build, support, and own parts of the foundational technology that enables Strava to be the record of the world's athletic activities.
- Participate in mentorship relationships with your teammates and beyond.
- Empower your engineering colleagues, providing them the tools, libraries, and platform to deliver scalable, reliable, and observable products.
You will be successful here by:
- Demonstrating empathy for other engineers and thinking about how the service platform enhances and enables their work.
- Being open to learning new technologies and stretching outside your comfort zone.
- Engaging in mentorship opportunities to help you and your colleagues grow as engineers.
- Displaying ownership of your work by managing deployment and participating in an on-call rotation.
We’re excited about you because you:
- Have a passion for the reliability, scalability, and usability of what you make.
- Have previously worked in a platform- or backend-focused role where you build software and systems for other engineers such as Platform Engineer, Server Engineer, Productivity Engineer, etc.
- Have a history of fully owning your work, from designing and building to maintaining and being on-call.
- Love working on production systems.
- Are security-minded when developing and working on system
Some of our Technical Expectations
Finding one person with all of the following is almost impossible, so we’re not looking for 100% coverage. If you have experience with at least a couple of these, we’d love to hear from you:
- Experience with AWS or another cloud provider such as Azure or GCP.
- Experience with at least one programming language such as Ruby, Scala, Java, or Python.
- Experience with GraphQL.
- Experience deploying software with container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, or Mesos.
- Experience with relational data stores such as MySQL or PostgreSQL and ideally one or more key-value, columnar, or time series data stores such as Cassandra, Redis, or Elasticsearch.
- Experience with streaming systems such as Kafka.
About Strava
Strava is Swedish for “strive,” which epitomizes who we are and what we do. We’re a passionate and committed team, unified by our mission to connect athletes to what motivates them and help them find their personal best. And with billions of activity uploads from all over the world, we have a humbling and audacious vision: to be the record of the world’s athletic activities and the technology that makes every effort count.
Strava builds software that makes the best part of our athletes’ days even better. And just as we’re deeply committed to unlocking their potential, we’re dedicated to providing a world-class, inclusive workplace where our employees can grow and thrive, too. We’re backed by Sequoia Capital, Madrone Partners and Jackson Square Ventures, and we’re expanding in order to exceed the needs of our growing community of global athletes. Our culture reflects our community – we are continuously striving to hire and engage diverse teammates from all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives because we know we are a stronger team together.
In light of the global pandemic, Strava is currently working in a fully remote capacity. As always, we remain committed to fully supporting our employees, especially their mental health and wellbeing, through these challenging times. Despite challenges in the world around us, we are continuing to grow camaraderie and positivity within our culture and we are unified in our commitment to becoming an antiracist company. We are differentiated by our truly people-first approach, our compassionate leadership, and our belief that we can bring joy and inspiration to athletes’ lives — now more than ever. All to say, it’s a great time to join Strava!
Strava is an equal opportunity employer. In keeping with the values of Strava, we make all employment decisions including hiring, evaluation, termination, promotional and training opportunities, without regard to race, religion, color, sex, age, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, physical handicap, mental disability, medical condition, disability, gender or identity or expression, pregnancy or pregnancy-related condition, marital status, height and/or weight.
We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation.
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