Engineering Manager, AgentControl

LaunchDarkly; Oakland (CA); On-site; USD 163,000 - 224,000; Full time

Job summary

LaunchDarkly is seeking an Engineering Manager for the AgentControl Evaluations team in Oakland, CA. You will lead a group building and operating critical offline evaluation components, including playgrounds and annotated datasets, using Go, Python and TypeScript.

You will partner with PM and Design to plan roadmaps, own feature delivery, and drive a high-performing engineering culture across time zones. Proactive hiring and strong communication are essential.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering with at least 2 years managing a team of backend or infrastructure engineers.
• Proven ability to partner with Product Management to translate business goals into engineering plans with reliable estimations.
• Strong communication skills in distributed teams across time zones.
• Track record of coaching and developing engineers, including performance management and career growth planning.
• Familiarity with observability practices and production incident response.
• Familiarity with AI tools and providers and related tooling.
• Experience with Go and Python or comparable backend languages is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of engineers, providing coaching, feedback, and career growth opportunities.
• Partner with PM and Design to scope, estimate, and sequence roadmap items, making scope tradeoffs in real time.
• Own the team's delivery of features, ensuring completion within timelines and quality requirements.
• Collaborate with adjacent teams on shared infrastructure decisions and cross-team dependencies.
• Communicate roadmaps, risks, and progress clearly to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Build team working norms that promote collaboration and reduce silos.
• Drive operational excellence — improve reliability, observability, and incident response for production infrastructure.
• Participate in hiring to grow the team and raise the engineering bar

Skills

People management

Software engineering

Go

Python

Typescript

Tools

AWS

CockroachDB

Datadog

Observability

Job description

We're looking for an Engineering Manager for our AgentControl Evaluations team. In this role, you'll lead the team that builds and operates a critical part of the core AgentControl product, focused on offline evaluations, playgrounds, LLM-as-judges, and annotated datasets.

LaunchDarkly’s AgentControl team is on a mission to manage the complete software development lifecycle for shipping agents to production, from configuring to benchmarking to observing and beyond. This team has a huge opportunity ahead of it; we're growing fast and we need your help writing the next chapter in our story. AgentControl is built atop critical systems such as the web application that customers interact with on a daily basis and distributed systems that power AI evaluations at scale. These systems enable customers to control, monitor, and optimize their agent’s functionality. You and your team will primarily work in Go, Python, and Typescript and will work directly with other technologies and tools such as AWS, CockroachDB, and Datadog.

As the Engineering Manager, you'll bring a balance of people management and technical leadership as you drive the development of the multiple services that power this product and foster a high-performing, collaborative engineering culture.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and develop a team of engineers, providing coaching, feedback, and career growth opportunities.


• Partner with PM and Design to scope, estimate, and sequence roadmap items, making scope tradeoffs in real time.


• Own the team's delivery of features, ensuring completion within timelines and quality requirements.


• Collaborate with adjacent teams (AI Agents, Observability, Feature Management) on shared infrastructure decisions and cross-team dependencies.


• Communicate roadmaps, risks, and progress clearly to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.


• Build team working norms that promote collaboration, reduce silos, and keep engineers engaged.


• Drive operational excellence — improve reliability, observability, and incident response for production infrastructure.


• Participate in hiring to grow the team and raise the engineering bar

Qualifications:

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years managing a team of backend or infrastructure engineers


• Proven ability to partner with Product Management to translate business goals into engineering plans with reliable estimations


• Strong communication skills, especially in distributed team environments with cross-timezone collaboration


• Track record of coaching and developing engineers, including performance management, career growth planning, and technical mentorship


• Familiarity with observability practices (metrics, tracing, alerting, structured logging) and comfort with production incident response


• Familiarity with common AI providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Bedrock, Gemini) and popular AI tooling (Langchain, Arize)


• Experience with Go and Python or comparable backend languages (Java, Rust, Ruby) is a plus

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level M2:

• 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.

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 Afffetterative Action Plan. To do so, contact People Ops at [e-mail] .

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. Please notify us of any fraudulent representation by sending an email to [e-mail] .