Senior Engineering Manager, Applied Machine Learning

About This Role

Strava is the app for active people. With over 150 million athletes in more than 185 countries, Strava is where connection, motivation, and personal bests thrive. No matter your activity, gear, or goals, we help you 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 Senior Engineering Manager to lead our Applied AI and Machine Learning team at Strava. This team is responsible for building and productionalizing machine learning models and AI systems that power key Strava user experiences. These models provide value to our athletes across product surfaces with capabilities ranging from personalization, recommendations, search, and trust and safety.

This is a critical leadership role where you'll manage and grow a team of ML engineers. You'll be responsible for roadmapping, driving technical strategy for AI that support Strava across multiple product verticals and balancing innovative machine learning models with product impact from AI solutions at scale.

We follow a flexible hybrid model that translates to more than half of 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

Lead a High-Impact ML Team: Manage, mentor, and grow a team of machine learning engineers to deliver AI-powered experiences to users while fostering a collaborative culture across experience levels

Own End-to-End ML Strategy and Execution: Drive the roadmap for ML systems across Strava's platform, from initial model prototyping to production deployment, scaling, and optimization

Shape AI at Strava: Be a strategic voice in defining Strava's AI vision, leading cross-functional initiatives with Product and Engineering teams to deploy solutions across multiple product surfaces

Drive Innovation in AI for Fitness: Guide your team in designing and developing novel models and methodologies for unique fitness challenges, including recommendation systems, activity prediction, and personalized athlete insights

Building cross-functional partnerships: Develop strong relationships and effectively communicate with many cross-functional partners to identify highest leverage opportunities across product verticals

Championing team culture: Be passionate about developing your people and contributing positively to Strava's inclusive and collaborative culture, fostering an environment where your team can do their best work

What You’ll Bring to the Team:

• 3 years of experience managing an AI/ML engineering team, with a proven track record of growing engineers and delivering complex technical projects.
• Focus on applied ML solutions anchored user problems and business goals.
• Demonstrated track record of solving complex, ambiguous machine learning problems and broken them down into strategies and tactical execution
• Technical Experience building, shipping, and supporting ML models in production at scale for domains like recommendation systems, personalization or user understanding.
• Interested in production ML model operational excellence and best practices, like automated model retraining, performance monitoring, feature logging, A/B testing, and scalable ML architecture.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and align stakeholders across multiple engineering and product teams.

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 zones 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: $260,000-$310,000. This range reflects base compensation only and does not include equity or benefits. Your recruiter can share more details about the full compensation package 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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