Staff Engineer, LaunchDarkly
Service Reliability
$170-260k
Salary dependent on location, Plus Restricted Stock Units
Feature management for software teams
Open for applications
Feature management for software teams
501-1000 employees
Open for applications
$170-260k
Salary dependent on location, Plus Restricted Stock Units
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower all teams to deliver and control their software.
Role
Who you are
- Demonstrable experience building and operating large-scale, highly available distributed systems; You also possess advanced analytical skills to anticipate and mitigate complex system behaviors and incidents before they impact our customers
- Solid prior experience with server-side web development (e.g., in Java / Scala, Ruby, Python, Golang, Node.js) and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform.)
- Experience guiding the architectural direction and scalability considerations for new projects
- Strong understanding and proactive management of security practices related to SRE, coordinating with our Security team to fortify infrastructure
- Extensive experience working with major cloud providers, observability tooling, and RDBMS technologies is crucial for this role
- Experience driving alignment on decisions with cross-team impact, identifying misalignment across the team, and bringing stakeholders together to realign
- Strong customer focus and ability to make technical decisions that tie back to business goals
- Exceptional communication skills, a positive attitude, and a high degree of empathy
What the job involves
- You'll help us tackle some of the most challenging engineering problems around, like delivering feature flags to hundreds of millions of users worldwide in milliseconds
- In this role, you'll oversee the health of our core systems and reliability tooling, respond to and mitigate incidents quickly, and identify and drive opportunities that make our core services more resilient
- You will also identify and develop force-multiplying capabilities for our internal engineering teams, helping our engineers become more effective at shipping robust code and thinking about reliable design earlier in the lifecycle
- Lead the development and continuous refinement of SRE tools and processes to improve software delivery, observability, reliability and operational efficiency. Your impact extends beyond your team’s boundary to proactively improve our overall service health
- Shape and communicate the technical roadmap, driving Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to deliver strategic insights that elevate system reliability, scalability, and operational effectiveness
- Define and lead the technical architecture for LaunchDarkly’s reliability strategies, establishing a cohesive framework that enhances resilience, flexibility, and alignment with business goals
- Uplevel our engineering team to deliver their services with higher autonomy, reliability, and performance through offerings written in Go and Terraform, or delivered through existing tools
- Develop, communicate, and implement strategic goals and objectives for the SRE organization, ensuring alignment with company-wide initiatives and promoting long-term operational success
- Partner with various team members to define and mature our SRE culture through principles, technical frameworks, tooling, and processes. You will mentor and coach SRE team members and engineers in adjacent teams to promote a culture of SRE learning and growth
- Drive the adoption of new technologies, system designs and best practices in code health, testing, observability, and service maintainability across teams
- Proactively identify and resolve potential performance and scalability bottlenecks in our front-end and back-end systems and underlying infrastructure
- Analyze the performance of SQL queries, suggest improvements and build guardrails for teams
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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