Staff EngineerAbout the roleStaff scope at LaunchDarkly is defined by impact rather than title alone. The specific domain may include platform infrastructure, APIs, SDKs, data systems, observability, experimentation, feature management, or AI/agent capabilities.
As a Staff Engineer at LaunchDarkly, you will provide technical leadership beyond a single team. You will help define direction for important systems or product areas, guide complex initiatives, and create leverage by enabling other engineers to make better decisions and deliver with confidence.
Staff Engineers at LaunchDarkly are trusted for their judgment, influence, and ability to connect customer needs, business goals, product strategy, and technical execution. You may lead architecture across multiple teams, establish durable patterns, improve developer effectiveness, or help the organization navigate a significant change in technology or product direction.
This is an individual contributor role. You will lead through expertise, communication, and influence rather than through direct people management.
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.
Pay: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.
