What you’ll do
Set technical direction for complex, high-impact systems, products, or cross-team initiatives.
Lead architecture and design work that improves scalability, performance, reliability, security, operability, and developer experience.
Clarify ambiguous problems, identify the highest-leverage opportunities, and help teams make timely, well-informed decisions.
Partner with Product, Design, Engineering Managers, and senior leaders to connect technical investments to customer and business outcomes.
Influence teams outside your immediate area through strong technical proposals, inclusive decision-making, and clear communication.
Improve engineering effectiveness through reusable patterns, paved paths, documentation, mentoring, and thoughtful process improvements.
Contribute directly to critical projects when hands-on technical work is the best way to create leverage.
Represent customer needs and production realities in technical and product discussions.
Develop other engineers through mentorship, feedback, and opportunities to grow their scope.
Qualifications
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.)
Significant experience delivering and operating production software, including systems or products with meaningful scale, complexity, or reliability requirements.
Demonstrated technical leadership across team or organizational boundaries, without relying on formal authority.
Experience making architecture and design decisions for complex systems and communicating the tradeoffs clearly.
A track record of turning ambiguous, high-impact problems into aligned plans and shipped outcomes.
Strong understanding of software quality, observability, operational health, security, and sustainable delivery practices.
Ability to balance long-term technical direction with pragmatic, incremental execution.
A collaborative leadership style grounded in curiosity, inclusion, clear communication, and respect for different perspectives.
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 5:
Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $214,800 - $295,350**
Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $193,400 - $265,870**
Zone 3: All other US locations - $182,600 - $251,0202**
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 .
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Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance.
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