Staff AI Engineer

Strava; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Strava is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to join the GenAI + Discovery Platform team in San Francisco. In this role, you will be instrumental in building the shared tooling necessary for product teams to develop high-value GenAI-powered features. This position combines AI engineering with platform and server engineering.

The ideal candidate has extensive experience working with large language models and backend development. The company follows a hybrid work model, expecting more than half of the workweek on-site.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience building complex AI or backend systems.
• Experience with AI platform tooling for LLM or ML systems.
• Hands-on experience with large language models in production.

Responsibilities

• Build AI features at the intersection of AI and fitness.
• Design and build GenAI platform for product teams.
• Collaborate across engineering and product teams.

Skills

Experience with production AI systems

API design and versioning

Hands-on with large language models

Proficiency in search systems

Backend service development

Technical leadership skills

Strong collaboration skills

Tools

Elasticsearch

Kubernetes

Docker

AWS

Job description

We are looking for a Staff AI Engineer to join the GenAI + Discovery Platform team at Strava, a team at the core of Strava's AI strategy, responsible for building the shared tooling that enables product teams to ship high value GenAI-powered features at scale. This role sits at the intersection of AI engineering, platform engineering, and server engineering. You will own the systems that make it easy and reliable for all of our product teams to build user facing features on top LLMs at Strava, from shared context, tool management, agent loops, orchestration, data access, search and retrieval to evaluation and ROI frameworks. This is a high-leverage technical role: you're not just building infrastructure, you're building the core understanding of athletes that enable consistent athlete experiences, insight across product surfaces. You'll work closely with product engineers, product managers and data teams to translate cutting‑edge AI capabilities into production‑ready platforms that facilitate development of AI features that provide value to our athletes.

We follow a flexible hybrid model that translates to more than half your time on‑site in our San Francisco office — 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.

• Build the GenAI + Discovery Platform: Set the vision, Design and the shared genAI platform: LLM, and workflow orchestration, prompt management systems, RAG pipelines, search and retrieval services (vector, hybrid and structured search), and evaluation tooling

• Enable Teams to Ship AI Features Faster: Build self‑serve interfaces and golden paths so that product and CUJ engineering teams can build GenAI‑powered features without deep AI expertise.

• Own End-to-End AI Capability Delivery: Drive projects from architecture and interface design through production deployment and monitoring, ensuring correctness, latency, reliability, and cost‑efficiency of the AI capabilities your platform serves.

• Collaborate Across Engineering, and Product: Work closely with engineers and PMs across different verticals to enable the new features and build the genAI roadmap. inform product teams on how to consume and leverage AI capabilities effectively.

• Build from a Rich Dataset: Explore and use Strava's extensive unique fitness and geo datasets from millions of users to inform how AI capabilities can extract actionable insights, improve product decisions, and power novel athlete experiences.

You Will Be Successful Here By:

• Treating AI Platform as a Product: Bringing engineering rigor — versioning, contracts, SLAs, monitoring, and deprecation paths — to AI capabilities and LLM integrations that product teams depend on. You don't ship a prototype; you ship a platform.

• Leading as an Owner: Taking end‑to‑end accountability for the reliability and impact of the systems you build, including their correctness in production, their adoption by downstream teams, and the business outcomes they enable.

• Building for Leverage: Designing platforms and tooling that multiply the output of the broader team, reducing the AI infrastructure expertise required for CUJ teams to ship GenAI‑powered features.

• Collaborating Across Disciplines: Working fluidly with ML engineers, data engineers, data scientists, and product managers to align on model selection, evaluation standards, prompt strategies, and consumption patterns.

• Raising the Standard: Helping establish best practices for GenAI system development, responsible AI patterns, and operational health, and mentoring teammates at all levels to do the same.

• 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:

• 5+ years of experience building and operating complex, production AI or backend systems at scale, with a track record of decomposing large technical problems into well‑scoped execution across teams.
• Demonstrated experience building AI platform tooling or developer‑facing infrastructure ideally for LLM or ML systems with a strong instinct for API design, versioning, and self‑serve patterns.
• Hands‑on experience building with large language models in production: agentic workflows, prompt and context engineering, RAG architectures, embedding pipelines, fine‑tuning workflows, or LLM evaluation frameworks and tools like Langchain .
• Proficiency in search systems (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Vector Search, etc)
• Proficiency in backend service development on cloud environments (AWS preferred), using Python, Go. Solid understanding of distributed systems and containerized infrastructure (Kubernetes, Docker).
• Strong technical leadership: ability to lead multi‑team projects, define technical direction, and grow engineers at multiple levels.
• Deep curiosity about the evolving GenAI landscape: model capabilities, agent frameworks, multimodal systems: and strong judgment on where and how to apply them to real product problems.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to align cross‑functional partners around technical direction and build organizational trust in the platforms your team ships.

For information on benefits, please click here.

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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