About Strava Strava is the app for active people. With over 180 million athletes in more than 185 countries, it’s more than tracking workouts—it’s where people make progress together, from new habits to new personal bests. No matter your sport or how you track it, Strava’s got you covered. Find your crew, crush your goals, and make every effort count. 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. About This Role The Research & Insights team at Strava paves the way towards making confident, user-centered decisions that help our business and product innovation expand. We turn signals into strategy by providing audience understanding, validating opportunities, and shaping experiences that help our users thrive and keep choosing Strava for all their fitness habits, needs and activities. We are looking for a Staff Researcher to build and lead the end-to-end research program for Community Engagement + Trust & Safety. This is a crucial part of the Strava experience and mission, as the Community Engagement + Trust & Safety teams seek to foster and protect what makes Strava special: a welcoming, authentic community where Strava members support each other. We build the systems and experiences that keep our platform safe, connected, inclusive, and inspiring for our global community of 150+ million users. You will partner with cross-functional partners, driving research that shapes product strategy and ensures decisions are informed by data and meaningful insights. You will be reporting directly to the Director of Research and Insights. 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, with occasional travel to Denver. What You’ll Do: • Build and lead the research vertical for Trust & Safety and Community Engagement, guiding Strava towards best research practices in this area, thought leadership and implementing a high degree of sophistication in this area. • Identify, prioritize, and lead research roadmaps that have a tangible impact on company and product strategy, user satisfaction and business outcomes in partnership with stakeholders and the research team. • Lead high-visibility research projects, collaborating closely with cross functional partners such as: Design, Product Management, Data Science, Engineering, Marketing, Policy, etc. • Identify best opportunities and practices for socialization of research insights, and forge high-trust relationships with colleagues, fostering collaboration and innovation. By doing so, you influence cross-functional partners to act on research insights by providing clear, actionable recommendations and relevant business context. What You’ll Bring to the Team: • Strong product thinking and leadership: • Able to connect dots across multiple product and business areas (such as policy, partnerships, legal, etc) and infuse the Trust & Safety expertise required for digital social platforms such as Strava. This role has an additional focus on Community Engagement, which will require an ability to uncover and prioritize user needs from diverse community ecosystems (like Strava running clubs) and markets. • Ability to inform and influence strategic direction and senior stakeholders, including exec-level stakeholders. • Self-direction and initiative, experience and conviction to advocate for rigorous research and show the organization what that looks like and what’s needed to achieve it. We need an experienced researcher that can influence and lead, has a clear POV, a high degree of expertise and experience - able to challenge the status quo when necessary. • A balance of creative and analytical skills with the ability to proactively define research questions, identify appropriate methods, execute studies, and synthesize findings. Experience with conducting research with teens and young adults is a plus. • A proven record of experience working in the field of Trust and Safety, with a priority for products that include Social, Community and User Generated Content. You will be establishing this field of research at the company, and will bring new research methods and tools, as well as best practices that help us build and evolve a best-in-class research team in an organization that is hungry for a user-centered development approach, and is very supportive of the impact that research can have. • Excitement and love for the Strava product, business and most importantly, our mission: to motivate people to live their best active lives. We believe in the power of movement to connect and drive people forward. • Ability to pivot and be flexible, finding a balance between highly rigorous research with the realities of working in a late stage startup that requires scrappiness and fast pace approaches when necessary. This Role Requires: • 6+ yrs of experience in p