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Senior Database Engineer

About This Role

Strava is the leading digital community for active people with more than 125 million athletes, in more than 190 countries. The platform offers a holistic view of your active lifestyle, no matter where you live, which sport you love and/or what device you use. Everyone belongs on Strava when they are pursuing an active life.

This role is on the Strava Foundation Team, which exists to provide tools, systems, and support to make Strava reliable, scalable, and performant for our athletes. We build infrastructure and tools to support every engineer developing Strava.

Engineers on the Foundation Team work on a wide variety of projects and technologies; recent projects have included migrating from Mesos to Kubernetes, migrating and upgrading from Cassandra to Scylla, and improving our disaster recovery capabilities.

This is a hybrid role based in our San Francisco or Denver office.

For more information on compensation and benefits, please click here.

You’re excited about this opportunity because you:

  • Are excited to work on and support a platform that supports millions of athletes and activities every day.
  • Enjoy developing software that empowers your engineering colleagues, providing them with the tools and platforms to deliver scalable, reliable, and observable products.
  • Enjoy working on the full cycle of automated testing, build, deploy, release, and operations across multiple platforms (mobile, frontend, backend, infrastructure).
  • Will have a high-leverage impact on product development velocity by empowering all engineering teams to go faster and more optimally.
  • Love the thrill of sunsetting legacy software in favor of the latest and greatest industry supported options and championing best practices.
  • Are stoked to help shape the future of our Kubernetes ecosystem

You will be successful here by:

  • Being highly self-motivated and self-starting, with exceptional attention to detail
  • Having a product-approached mentality toward infrastructure and tools work - collaborating with users of your systems and building an efficient feedback loop across the whole engineering team and product.
  • Building empathy for your fellow engineers by developing a deep understanding of the product development process end-to-end.
  • Evaluating trade-offs and effectively prioritizing tasks for yourself and within your team, in alignment with tactical goals, strategic initiatives, and company objectives
  • Seeking out engineering solutions to problems and eschewing toil.
  • Displaying ownership of your work by supporting your products and participating in an on-call rotation.

We’re excited about you because you:

  • Have previously worked in an infrastructure, developer productivity, or operations-focused role, such as DevOps engineer, SRE, developer productivity engineer, or platform engineer.
  • We run on Kubernetes, MySQL, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, Redis, S3, and Terraform. You don’t need to be an expert in all of these, but practical production experience with some is highly desired.
  • Have a passion for reducing toil, especially when it comes to scaling relational databases.
  • Program expertly in at least one language. If you know Scala, Python, or Ruby, that’s a bonus!
  • Can improvise and adapt. Rote processes won’t always work here, so bring your bag of tricks, especially when it comes to talking through the strengths and weaknesses of various datastore systems (relational, distributed, in-memory, object stores, document stores).
  • Can explain complex technical concepts, like how indexes work and how to approach a schema review. You should also be comfortable navigating a poorly performing query and identifying optimization opportunities.
  • Are a strong, clear, and proactive communicator who values sharing knowledge with others. We are a distributed company spread across many time zones, dependent on many forms of communication to collaborate and achieve our goals.

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. With billions of activity uploads from all over the world, we have a humbling and adventurous 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. 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 diverse teammates from all backgrounds, experiences and perspectives because we know we are a stronger team together.

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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