Backend Engineer, LaunchDarkly
Observability
$141.9-210k
Salary dependent on location. + RSUs
Feature management for software teams
Be an early applicant
Feature management for software teams
501-1000 employees
Be an early applicant
$141.9-210k
Salary dependent on location. + RSUs
501-1000 employees
Company mission
To empower all teams to deliver and control their software.
Role
Who you are
- If you’re passionate about observability, distributed systems, and empowering engineering teams with real-time data at massive scale, we’d love to have you join us
- 5+ years of Application Backend Software Engineering experience
- Experience with server-side programming languages (e.g. Go, Node.js, Python)
- Understanding of data pipelines, message brokers (e.g., Kafka), and storage engines (e.g. ClickHouse)
- Experience using AI tooling to accelerate daily software development (e.g. Cursor, Devin, Glean). Familiarity with frontend prototyping tools (v0, Lovable, Bolt) is a plus, especially in the context of full-stack web development
- Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry or other observability frameworks, including metric aggregation, tracing, and log collection
- Proven track record of designing and maintaining GraphQL or RESTful or APIs that serve thousands of requests per second
- Familiar with capacity planning, horizontal scaling, performance tuning, and production-grade reliability practices
- Strong grasp of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and distributed consensus
- Excellent communication skills, with a passion for partnering across functions to solve complex problems
- Self-driven, curious about emerging observability technologies, and committed to continuous learning and improvement
What the job involves
- LaunchDarkly is looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join our Observability team, delivering best-in-class telemetry to help engineers monitor, analyze, and debug their applications in real time
- Our mission is to redefine software release and reliability by automating end-to-end processes, measuring the real-time impact of feature rollouts, and simplifying incident diagnosis when things go wrong
- From code-level tracing to browser user journeys, these signals form the backbone of safe, data-driven releases
- You’ll help shape the foundation of how our customers understand and optimize their feature rollouts, building systems that are performant, reliable, and easy to operate at massive scale
- Our work spans everything from collecting raw telemetry to transforming and enriching it, storing it cost-effectively, and exposing high-fidelity metrics and visualizations
- You’ll partner closely with product teams to ensure we’re delivering insights that matter, all while helping scale our data ingestion pipeline to handle trillions of events per day
- Build out the next-generation ingestion pipeline for OpenTelemetry metrics, traces, and logs, capable of processing high throughput with low latency
- Tune and optimize distributed data systems (e.g., Kafka, ClickHouse) to ensure resilience, throughput, and cost-efficiency
- Drive features from conception through production: write prototypes, define APIs, build robust services, and validate correctness in production
- Collaborate on OpenTelemetry SDK enhancements to help customers emit the right signals
- Work hand-in-hand with product managers, UX designers, and frontend engineers to deliver customer-facing metrics capabilities
- Actively mentor and support colleagues across the organization
- Actively participate in code reviews, spec reviews, and architecture design
- Contribute to the improvement of engineering standards, tooling, and processes across the technology organization
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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