Staff EngineerAbout LaunchDarkly EngineeringLaunchDarkly helps engineering organizations ship software and AI with speed, safety, and control. Our platform gives teams the confidence to release gradually, target experiences to the right audiences, learn through experimentation, understand what is happening in production, and respond quickly when risk appears.
Our engineers build the systems, services, SDKs, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and product experiences that make this possible. The work spans high-scale distributed systems, reliable data and event pipelines, intuitive enterprise workflows, and AI-powered capabilities that help teams manage the next generation of software delivery.
LaunchDarkly's SDKs are used in systems that perform trillions of feature flag evaluations each day, giving our engineering work a direct connection to the reliability and customer experience of software around the world. As the company grows, we are expanding beyond traditional feature management into experimentation, observability, and AgentControl-helping customers control more of the software and AI lifecycle. That creates an unusually broad set of technical challenges, visible customer impact, and room for engineers to shape what comes next.
We believe in the power of teams. We work with humility, openness, curiosity, and care; we value clear communication, thoughtful technical judgment, inclusive collaboration, and a strong sense of ownership. We encourage people to apply even when they do not meet every qualification listed below. We are interested in the experience, perspective, and potential you would bring to the role.
About 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.
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
Do you need a disability accommodation?Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, LaunchDarkly recruiters will only contact you from @launchdarkly.com email addresses or via LinkedIn from "Verified Recruiter" accounts. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate LaunchDarkly recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before making a job offer. LaunchDarkly will never make a job offer without conducting a formal interview process. Our interview process does not involve asking detailed questions by email. If you are ever unsure about a communication that you receive, don't click any links-visit Careers | LaunchDarkly directly for confirmed job openings and links to apply.
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