Staff Engineer, LaunchDarkly
Distributed Systems
$177-287k
Salary varies by location; + Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
Feature management for software teams
Be an early applicant
Feature management for software teams
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$177-287k
Salary varies by location; + Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower all teams to deliver and control their software.
Role
Who you are
- This role is ideal for someone who thrives on building low-latency, high-availability systems at scale
- If you’re passionate about distributed systems, excited by global-scale engineering challenges, and motivated by a strong sense of ownership, this is the job for you
- This is a senior-level role where deep technical experience, a systems-thinking mindset, and a bias for action are critical
- Proven experience in architecting, building, and operating complex, large-scale backend and infrastructure services, with a multi-year, hands-on focus specifically on distributed systems. This level of expertise is typically found in engineers with 10+ years of relevant industry experience
- Deep understanding of event-driven architectures, streaming protocols (e.g., Server-Sent Events, WebSockets), and stateful connection management at scale
- Expertise in Go, Java, Rust or similar systems programming languages. (We use Go and a little bit of Rust.)
- Familiarity with real-time data pipelines, load balancing, and global edge networks/CDNs
- Proven experience in monitoring, observability, and operational excellence — designing systems with robust telemetry and actionable alerting to meet SLOs for low latency and high availability
- Experience operating systems in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP) using infrastructure-as-code tools
- Experience working with distributed data stores and caching systems (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka, Varnish and similar)
- Proven history of technical leadership: setting direction, breaking down complex problems, and influencing outcomes across teams
What the job involves
- As a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer on LaunchDarkly’s Flag Delivery Network (FDN) team, you’ll play a critical role in shaping one of the most high-performance, globally distributed systems powering modern software delivery
- The FDN is responsible for delivering real-time feature flag updates to tens of millions of connected SDKs across web, mobile, and server environments—at a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of updates per second
- This infrastructure is a mission-critical part of our platform, and your work will directly impact the performance, reliability, and safety of software rollouts for some of the world’s most innovative engineering teams
- You’ll architect and evolve the systems behind our global edge delivery infrastructure, collaborate with SDK and platform teams, and lead initiatives that push the boundaries of what’s possible in edge computing and real-time data propagation
- You’ll be expected to lead by example—driving operational excellence, mentoring teammates, and owning systems throughout their lifecycle, including being part of the on-call rotation
- Architect, design, and build resilient and scalable systems for delivering feature flag data globally, optimized for high availability and low latency — single-digit milliseconds within regions
- Own and evolve core components such as our global edge delivery network, streaming infrastructure, and data synchronization protocols
- Drive improvements in system availability, performance, and operational excellence by identifying bottlenecks and designing for failure
- Collaborate cross-functionally with infrastructure, SDK, product, and security teams to deliver seamless and secure customer experiences
- Mentor and lead other engineers by modeling best practices in distributed systems development, code quality, and systems thinking
- Take initiative in incident response and post-incident reviews, continually improving system reliability and observability
- Participate in an on-call rotation for the services you help build, and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and accountability for their uptime and reliability
Our take
Feature flags are a powerful software development tool, allowing teams to modify system behavior without changing code, therefore minimizing risk. If a business has a new feature they want to test, they can then roll it out to a small set of users before letting it go live. These companies can, for example, get quick feedback on the new feature and fix any bugs, or roll back any changes.
LaunchDarkly allows companies to run tests like this by activating the new code for only a small set of users prior to launch. Typically running these tests requires lots of developer time - a daunting and expensive prospect for most rapidly growing businesses - and can risk disruption to the user experience if testing takes place on the live product.
The platform is used by more than 1,500 customers, including the likes of IBM, Intuit and Atlassian. Signalling a change in strategy, the company shook up its management in 2023 and is now aiming to scale its already strong growth under the leadership of Dan Rogers, a product and marketing specialist with an impressive track record at Rubrik, AWS and Microsoft. It is now well poised to develop into a leading business in the feature management space.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
0% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Aug 2021
$200m
SERIES D
Jan 2020
$54m
LATE VC
Total funding: $330.3m
Company benefits
- Full Vision
- Full Dental
- Full Medical
- Flexible Schedule
- Healthy Lunches & Snacks
- Conference & Meetup Access
- Education Stipend
- Personalized Work Station
- Close to Public Transportation
- Bike Parking
- Team Activities
- Unlimited paid time off policy
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
Company HQ
Lakeside, Oakland, CA
Leadership
Edith Harbaugh
(Executive Chair)Worked as a Product Manager at Vignette, Monster Worldwide, and PlantSense. Previously Product Director at TripIt.
John Kodumal
(CTO)Prior to co-founding LaunchDarkly was Software Development Manager at Atlassian and Bytecode Anaylsis Architect for Coverity.
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