Backend EngineerAbout the roleWe have multiple backend engineering roles open on various teams. The specific level, scope, and technical focus will be aligned to the opportunity and the candidate's experience. Experience with cloud platforms, distributed systems, developer tools, SDK engineering, data infrastructure, observability, or AI/agent systems may be relevant for some teams.
As a Backend Engineer at LaunchDarkly, you will design, build, and operate the services that power reliable software delivery for our customers. You may work on APIs, distributed systems, configuration and event pipelines, data services, SDK-related infrastructure, platform capabilities, or backend systems supporting our product experiences.
You will work with experienced engineers, Product, Design, and partner teams to turn customer and business needs into simple, scalable solutions. You will have the opportunity to own work from early design through production, learn from real customer impact, and contribute to systems that operate at meaningful scale.
What you'll do- Design, implement, test, and operate production services and APIs.
- Lead projects or meaningful components of projects from problem definition through deployment and iteration.
- Make thoughtful tradeoffs across scalability, performance, reliability, security, maintainability, and delivery speed.
- Improve the observability and operability of the systems you own, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and incident learnings.
- Collaborate with Product, Design, Support, Customer Success, and other engineering teams to understand needs and deliver useful outcomes.
- Participate in technical design discussions and code reviews, sharing constructive feedback and learning from teammates.
- Investigate production issues calmly and help turn operational lessons into lasting improvements.
- Contribute to a culture of inclusive collaboration, continuous improvement, and high-quality engineering.
Qualifications- 5+ years of experience building and operating production software in a professional environment, or equivalent demonstrable experience.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, testing, debugging, and API design.
- Experience with a backend language such as Go, Python, Rust, or an equivalent language. (Most of our teams use Go)
- Experience designing or contributing to services that need to be reliable, observable, and maintainable as usage grows.
- Ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical partners.
- A collaborative approach and a sense of ownership for both your work and its downstream customer impact.
- Comfort learning unfamiliar systems and working through ambiguous problems.
Pay:Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 3:
- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $171,200 - $235,400**
- Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $154,100 - $211,860 **
- Zone 3: All other US locations - $145,500 - $200,090 **
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.
