About the Job:We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead LaunchDarkly's Data Platform team and help shape the high-throughput data backbone behind our most important products. As Engineering Manager, you'll lead a technically deep team building and operating the systems that ingest, process, and serve the real-time and batch data powering Experimentation, Metrics, Observability, Release Guardian, AgentControl, and Data Export.
Working primarily in Go and Python, your team tackles ambitious distributed-systems challenges with technologies including Kinesis, Airflow, Athena, and Iceberg on S3, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Terraform, AWS, and Datadog. From evolving real-time analytics and context data to strengthening streaming and batch pipelines, you'll guide the platform that turns vast volumes of events into reliable, customer-facing product experiences while partnering across Core Engineering and product teams to make data faster, more resilient, and more useful for every LaunchDarkly customer.
Responsibilities:- Lead and develop a team of backend engineers, providing coaching, feedback, and career growth opportunities
- Own the delivery, correctness, and resilience of Data Platform's production systems, including Tier 0 ingestion endpoints and the pipelines and data stores behind them
- Partner with Product Management and consuming engineering teams to scope, estimate, and sequence roadmap work, making tradeoffs in real time
- Act as the primary communicator and point of contact for Data Platform with engineering leadership, partner teams, and customers
- Drive operational excellence: reliability, observability, cost, incident response, and on-call health
- Build team working norms that promote collaboration, reduce silos and bus factor, and keep engineers engaged
- Participate in hiring to grow the team and raise the engineering bar
Qualifications:- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years managing a team of backend or infrastructure engineers
- Experience owning high-throughput, reliability-critical production systems such as event ingestion, streaming or batch pipelines, or large analytical data stores
- Strong distributed-systems fundamentals and the judgment to guide technical tradeoffs with senior engineers
- Proven ability to partner with Product Management to translate business goals into engineering plans with reliable estimates
- Track record of coaching and developing engineers, including performance management, career growth planning, and technical mentorship
- Strong communication skills in a distributed, cross-time-zone environment
- Familiarity with observability practices (metrics, tracing, alerting, structured logging) and comfort leading production incident response
- Experience with Go or Python, and with technologies such as Kafka or Kinesis, ClickHouse, Airflow, Athena or Iceberg, Elasticsearch, and Terraform is a plus
Pay:Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 2:
- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $191,800 - $263,670**
- Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $172,600 - $237,270**
- Zone 3: All other US locations - $163,000 - $224,070**
- All Zones Inclusive of a 10% Bonus Target
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.
