Senior Backend Engineer - Build Scalable, Observable Systems

LaunchDarkly Group; United States; On-site; USD 163,000 - 264,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RSUs

Health insurance

Vision and dental insurance

Mental health benefits

Job summary

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable services powering software delivery at scale. You will own complex backend work from problem to production, collaborating with Product, Design and cross‑team stakeholders to deliver measurable customer impact.

You will lead ambiguous projects, design robust APIs, and strengthen observability and reliability while mentoring engineers and advancing engineering practices across teams.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building and operating production software with measurable impact.
• Strong fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, testing, debugging, API design, distributed systems.
• Deep experience with a backend language (Go, Python, Rust) – Go common across teams.
• Designs systems that remain reliable, observable, secure, and maintainable.
• Leads technical projects with ambiguous requirements and cross-team dependencies.
• Judgment in architecture, risk, and short- vs long-term tradeoffs.
• Explains complex decisions clearly and aligns technical and non-technical partners.
• Mentors engineers and strengthens team practices through feedback and guidance.
• Owns production outcomes and downstream customer impact.
• Adapts to unfamiliar systems with curiosity and collaborative mindset.

Responsibilities

• Lead backend projects, breaking them into milestones and aligning partners.
• Design, implement, test, and operate scalable, observable production services and APIs.
• Balance tradeoffs across scalability, performance, security, and cost.
• Identify architectural risks and drive durable improvements.
• Improve observability: metrics, logs, traces, alerts, SLAs.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Support, Success and other teams for outcomes.
• Influence technical direction via design docs, reviews, and communications.
• Mentor engineers and promote inclusive collaboration and growth.
• Provide production support and incident response with calm ownership.
• Elevate engineering practices and reusable patterns across teams.

Skills

7+ years experience

Backend fundamentals

Distributed systems

Go

Python

Rust

Architectural judgment

Mentoring engineers

Technical leadership

Tools

Go

Python

Rust

Job description

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and operate scalable services powering software delivery at scale. You will own complex backend work from problem to production, collaborating with Product, Design and cross‑team stakeholders to deliver measurable customer impact.

You will lead ambiguous projects, design robust APIs, and strengthen observability and reliability while mentoring engineers and advancing engineering practices across teams.