The job, in the employer's words
Backend Engineer
About LaunchDarkly Engineering
LaunchDarkly helps engineering organizations ship software and AI with speed, safety, and control. Our platform gives teams the confidence to release gradually, target experiences to the right audiences, learn through experimentation, understand what is happening in production, and respond quickly when risk appears.
Our engineers build the systems, services, SDKs, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and product experiences that make this possible. The work spans high-scale distributed systems, reliable data and event pipelines, intuitive enterprise workflows, and AI-powered capabilities that help teams manage the next generation of software delivery.
LaunchDarkly’s SDKs are used in systems that perform trillions of feature flag evaluations each day, giving our engineering work a direct connection to the reliability and customer experience of software around the world. As the company grows, we are expanding beyond traditional feature management into experimentation, observability, and AgentControl—helping customers control more of the software and AI lifecycle. That creates an unusually broad set of technical challenges, visible customer impact, and room for engineers to shape what comes next.
We believe in the power of teams. We work with humility, openness, curiosity, and care; we value clear communication, thoughtful technical judgment, inclusive collaboration, and a strong sense of ownership. We encourage people to apply even when they do not meet every qualification listed below. We are interested in the experience, perspective, and potential you would bring to the role.
About the role
We have multiple backend engineering roles open on various teams. The specific level, scope, and technical focus will be aligned to the opportunity and the candidate’s experience. Experience with cloud platforms, distributed systems, developer tools, SDK engineering, data infrastructure, observability, or AI/agent systems may be relevant for some teams.
As a Backend Engineer at LaunchDarkly, you will design, build, and operate the services that power reliable software delivery for our customers. You may work on APIs, distributed systems, configuration and event pipelines, data services, SDK-related infrastructure, platform capabilities, or backend systems supporting our product experiences.
You will work with experienced engineers, Product, Design, and partner teams to turn customer and business needs into simple, scalable solutions. You will have the opportunity to own work from early design through production, learn from real customer impact, and contribute to systems that operate at meaningful scale.
What you’ll do
- Design, implement, test, and operate production services and APIs.
- Lead projects or meaningful components of projects from problem definition through deployment and iteration.
- Make thoughtful tradeoffs across scalability, performance, reliability, security, maintainability, and delivery speed.
- Improve the observability and operability of the systems you own, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and incident learnings.
- Collaborate with Product, Design, Support, Customer Success, and other engineering teams to understand needs and deliver useful outcomes.
- Participate in technical design discussions and code reviews, sharing constructive feedback and learning from teammates.
- Investigate production issues calmly and help turn operational lessons into lasting improvements.
- Contribute to a culture of inclusive collaboration, continuous improvement, and high-quality engineering.
Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience building and operating production software in a professional environment, or equivalent demonstrable experience.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, testing, debugging, and API design.
- Experience with a backend language such as Go, Python, Rust, or an equivalent language. (Most of our teams use Go)
- Experience designing or contributing to services that need to be reliable, observable, and maintainable as usage grows.
- Ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical partners.
- A collaborative approach and a sense of ownership for both your work and its downstream customer impact.
- Comfort learning unfamiliar systems and working through ambiguous problems.
Pay:
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 3:
- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $171,200 - $235,400**
- Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $154,100 - $211,860 **
- Zone 3: All other US locations - $145,500 - $200,090 **
LaunchDarkly operates from a place of high trust and transparency; we are happy to state the pay range for our open roles to best align with your needs. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.
*Within the United States, our geographic pay zones are defined by counties surrounding major metropolitan areas.
**Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.
About LaunchDarkly:
Modern software delivery was supposed to be the foundation for a thriving digital business but reality has proven otherwise. Slow, inefficient development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented customer experiences are preventing developers from building their best software. The LaunchDarkly platform helps developers innovate on new features faster while protecting them with a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong. Developers can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And by gradually rolling out new application components, they escape nightmare "big-bang" technology migrations.
The LaunchDarkly platform was built to guide engineers to the next frontier of DevOps by:
- Improving the velocity and stability of software releases, without the fear of end customer outages
- Delivering targeted experiences by easily personalizing features to customer cohorts
- Maximizing the business impact of every feature through the ability to experiment and optimize
- Coordinating the release and optimization of software to provide consistent experiences across mobile platforms and device types
- Improving the effectiveness and productivity of engineering teams, by providing insights into engineering cadence and stability
At LaunchDarkly, we believe in the power of teams. We're building a team that is humble, open, collaborative, respectful and kind. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. LD invites any applicant to review our written Affirmative Action Plan. To do so, contact People Ops at hr@launchdarkly.com.
Do you need a disability accommodation?
Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, LaunchDarkly recruiters will only contact you from @launchdarkly.com email addresses or via LinkedIn from "Verified Recruiter" accounts. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate LaunchDarkly recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before making a job offer. LaunchDarkly will never make a job offer without conducting a formal interview process. Our interview process does not involve asking detailed questions by email. If you are ever unsure about a communication that you receive, don't click any links—visit Careers | LaunchDarkly directly for confirmed job openings and links to apply.
Please notify us of any fraudulent representation by sending an email to careers@launchdarkly.com.
Requirements mentioned
- 5+ years of experience building and operating production software in a professional environment, or equivalent demonstrable experience.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, testing, debugging, and API design.
- Experience with a backend language such as Go, Python, Rust, or an equivalent language. (Most of our teams use Go)
- Experience designing or contributing to services that need to be reliable, observable, and maintainable as usage grows.
- Ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical partners.
- A collaborative approach and a sense of ownership for both your work and its downstream customer impact.
- Comfort learning unfamiliar systems and working through ambiguous problems.
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