Staff Machine Learning Engineer

About This Role

Strava is the app for active people. With over 150 million athletes in more than 185 countries, it’s more than tracking workouts—it’s where connection, motivation, and personal bests thrive. No matter your activity, gear, or goals, Strava’s got you covered. Find your crew, crush your milestones, and keep moving forward. Start your journey 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.

We are looking for a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to join the growing AI and Machine Learning team at Strava. This team is responsible for sophisticated machine learning models and systems that power key Strava experiences which provide value to our athletes including personalization, recommendation, search, and trust and safety.

This is a leadership role in the ML team and across Product teams designing, roadmapping and implementing innovative machine learning algorithms. We value full stack ML engineers who are able to work on all parts of an ML pipeline from model building, evaluation, optimizing performance, and ensuring the scalability and reliability of these production models.

We follow a flexible hybrid model that generally translates to around half your time on-site in our San Francisco Office—roughly three days per week. 

What You’ll Do:

• Build for a Well Loved Consumer Product: Work at the intersection of AI and fitness to launch and optimize product experiences that will be used by tens of millions of active people worldwide
• Own End to End AI Systems: Lead key projects powered by ML on the Strava platform end-to-end, from initial model prototyping to shipping production code to scaling and optimizing inference and deployment
• Shape AI at Strava: Be a leadership voice and mentor on a highly collaborative team with a range of experience levels. Lead across teams to deploy ML solutions in multiple surfaces.
• Innovate in AI for Fitness: Design and develop novel models and methodologies to take on novel problems in that improve athlete experience, including recommendation systems, activity prediction, and personalized insights
• Build from a rich dataset: Explore and use Strava’s extensive unique fitness and geo datasets from millions of users to extract actionable insights, inform product decisions, and optimize existing features

You Will Be Successful Here By:

• Setting AI technical vision: Build, foster and expand the influence of AI here at Strava through understanding and collaboration with partners across teams set technical strategies for delivering impact through AI.
• Driving innovation with Product in mind: Stay up-to-date with the latest research in machine learning, AI, and related fields. Experiment, advocate and get support for innovative techniques to improve existing products or explore new features that result in step function changes to how we build AI .
• Raising the ML standard: Mentor engineers to shape how we do ML at Strava. Drive best practices for model development, deployment, and maintenance and be a go-to source of knowledge of the field.
• Collaborating in and across teams: Build relationships, advocate and connect with cross-org partners and product verticals understand needs, and build systems to bring your technical vision to life.
• Leading as an Owner: Owning your work end-to-end and being accountable for the outcomes in the projects you lead, influencing the ML team, partner teams and landing impact for the business. Ensure the end to end system delivers as expected.
• Analyzing the Data: Work closely with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to find opportunities for applying machine learning to drive impact and enhance Strava’s features and measure impact.
• Being passionate about the work you are doing and contributing positively to Strava’s inclusive and collaborative team culture and values

What You’ll Bring to the Team:

• Have worked on complex, ambiguous machine learning problems and broken them down into manageable tasks with both strategies and tactical execution.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in leading large projects and the ability to mentor and grow team members of all levels.
• Have demonstrated strong interpersonal and communication skills, and collaborative approach to drive strategies and drive business impact across teams.
• Have experience building, shipping, and supporting ML models in production at scale
• Have experience with exploratory data analysis and model prototyping, using languages such as Python or R and tools like Scikit learn, Pandas, Numpy, Pytorch, Sagemaker
• Have built and worked on data pipelines using large scale data technologies (like Spark, Hadoop, EMR, SQL, Snowflake)
• Are experienced and interested in production ML model operational excellence and best practices, like automated model retraining, performance monitoring, feature logging, A/B testing
• Have built backend production services on cloud environments like AWS, using languages like (but not limited to) Ruby, Java, Scala, Python, Go

Compensation Overview:

At Strava, we know our employees are the most important ingredient to our success, and our compensation and total rewards programs reflect that. We take a market-based approach to pay, and pay may vary depending on the department and your location. Salary ranges are categorized into one of three tiers based on a cost of labor index for that geographic area. We will determine the candidate’s starting pay based on job-related skills, experience, qualifications, work location, and market conditions. We may modify these ranges in the future. For more information, please contact your talent partner.

Compensation: $245,000 - $265,000. The base salary posted is within the compensation range for this role. This range reflects base pay only and does not include equity, or benefits. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your location during the hiring process.

For more information on benefits, please click here.

Why Join Us?

Movement brings us together. At Strava, we’re building the world’s largest community of active people, helping them stay motivated and achieve their goals. 

Our global team is passionate about making movement fun, meaningful, and accessible to everyone. Whether you’re shaping the technology, growing our community, or driving innovation, your work at Strava makes an impact.

When you join Strava, you’re not just joining a company—you’re joining a movement. If you’re ready to bring your energy, ideas, and drive, let’s build something incredible together.

Strava builds software that makes the best part of our athletes’ days even better. 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, TCV, 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 teammates from all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives because we know we are a stronger team together.

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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