Backend Engineer, LaunchDarkly
Flag Delivery
$145.5-235.4k
Salary dependent on location + Equity
Feature management for software teams
Be an early applicant
Feature management for software teams
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$145.5-235.4k
Salary dependent on location + Equity
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower all teams to deliver and control their software.
Role
Who you are
- 5+ years of backend software engineering experience
- Experience building or operating production backend systems
- Strong programming skills in Go, Java, Rust, or a similar backend language; today the team primarily uses Go, with some Rust in the broader environment
- Clear, existing AI usage in engineering work
- Ability to use AI without surrendering technical judgment
- Familiarity with distributed systems fundamentals such as caching, concurrency, failure modes, and reliability
- Experience debugging production issues and using observability to understand system behavior
- Ability to reason clearly about code, architecture, and system behavior
- Strong learning orientation and comfort working with senior engineers
- Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work well across engineering teams
- Willingness to participate in on-call and production support
- You are kind, coachable, and excited to learn from senior engineers
- You already use AI regularly in your engineering work and can explain how, when, and why
- You enjoy understanding how real systems behave in production, not just how they are supposed to work on paper
- You are curious about scale, failure, caching, delivery, and operability
- You are energized by debugging, tradeoffs, and steadily improving systems over time
- You bring real backend or infrastructure ownership, not just feature implementation
- You care about writing software that is maintainable, observable, and dependable
What the job involves
- LaunchDarkly is hiring a Backend Software Engineer to join our Flag Delivery team
- Serving data to our customers is the core of our product and we’re expanding the team to add bandwidth and energy
- The team is very senior, and this role is for someone eager to learn and grow as the team balances modernization with resilience and operational improvements
- In this role, you’ll build and improve backend services that sit directly on LaunchDarkly’s critical delivery path, partner closely with SDK, Platform, SRE, and Security, and work on real-time production systems at scale
- This role is a strong fit for an engineer who is excited by distributed systems, weird production behavior, and learning quickly on a senior team, and who already brings real production instincts, strong debugging judgment, and clear AI fluency in their engineering work
- Build, improve, and operate backend services that power LaunchDarkly’s Flag Delivery systems
- Contribute to systems that support streaming and polling delivery models for LaunchDarkly SDKs
- Debug production issues, improve service reliability, and help the team maintain strong standards around latency, availability, observability, and operability
- Work with technologies and patterns common to modern distributed backend systems, including caching layers, network services, concurrency, failure handling, and cloud infrastructure
- Collaborate closely with partner teams including SDK, Platform, SRE, Security, and Enterprise to deliver improvements across the broader platform
- Participate in the on-call rotation and take ownership of the systems you help build
- Learn the existing architecture deeply and make pragmatic improvements that increase system clarity, performance, and maintainability
- Use AI as part of your engineering workflow with sound judgment, including knowing when to use it, how to direct it effectively, and how to verify or reject its output
- Reason clearly about code, architecture, and whole-system behavior even when AI is in the loop
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.
Demonstrating its value to businesses, the platform is used by the likes of IBM, Intuit and Atlassian. Recently it has seemed to focus on further scaling its growth as it develops towards being 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
(Co-founder, Executive Chair & CEO)Worked as a Product Manager at Vignette, Monster Worldwide, and PlantSense. Previously Product Director at TripIt.
John Kodumal
(Co-founder & CTO)Prior to co-founding LaunchDarkly was Software Development Manager at Atlassian and Bytecode Anaylsis Architect for Coverity.
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