Senior Backend Engineer, Experimentation

Cervin; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 163,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Experimentation team, building a platform that enables data-driven product decisions and rigorous experimentation at scale.

You will design and operate scalable backend services and APIs, collaborating with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to translate customer needs into reliable technical solutions while maintaining observability and reliability.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience in backend services.
• Experience with distributed systems and data-intensive architectures.
• Proficient in Go; experience with Python, Rust, or C++ is a plus.
• Strong problem-solving and collaboration with cross-functional teams.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure and infrastructure-as-code.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate scalable backend services and APIs.
• Own backend components from discovery to production and maintenance.
• Improve observability, testing, and deployment safety.
• Collaborate with product, data science, and engineering teams.
• Participate in on-call rotations and incident response.

Skills

Go

Python

Rust

C++

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

APIs

Observability

Tools

ClickHouse

Postgres

Snowflake

Redshift

BigQuery

Databricks

Job description

About the Job:

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our Experimentation team.

The Experimentation team is building one of the company’s most strategic product areas: a platform that helps leading engineering organizations move beyond intuition and make product decisions with real statistical confidence.

Sitting at the intersection of large-scale systems, data science, and user experience, the team is creating a best-in-class experimentation product that lets customers set up, manage, and analyze experiments with ease while still earning the trust of even the most rigorous data teams.

From warehouse-native analysis to experimentation workflows built on top of LaunchDarkly’s massive feature management scale, this team is tackling ambitious technical problems with visible customer impact and a clear opportunity to define the future of modern software experimentation.

As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design and operate the services that power this product, contribute to technical direction, and help deliver new functionality to customers.

You will work closely with product managers, designers, data scientists, and engineers across LaunchDarkly to solve complex, data-intensive problems with meaningful customer impact.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate scalable backend services and APIs that power LaunchDarkly’s Experimentation product.
• Own backend components across their lifecycle, including technical discovery, design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, incident response, and continuous improvement.
• Build and evolve systems supporting experiment setup, event data ingestion, metric computation, results processing, and results presentation.
• Contribute to architectural decisions and technical proposals, making thoughtful trade-offs around scalability, reliability, performance, cost, and maintainability.
• Partner with product managers, designers, data scientists, and adjacent engineering teams to translate customer needs and product goals into reliable technical solutions.
• Collaborate with Data Platform, Warehouse Integrations, SDK, and other teams on shared data flows, services, and cross-team dependencies.
• Investigate complex production issues, identify root causes, and implement durable fixes.
• Improve observability, testing, deployment safety, operational processes, and the reliability of the systems you build.
• Participate in the team’s on-call rotation and take ownership of production systems in a you-build-it-you-run-it culture.
• Support teammates through thoughtful code reviews, design reviews, knowledge sharing, and informal mentorship.

Qualifications:

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant experience building and operating backend services in production.
• Fluency using AI tools in software engineering workflows, including the judgment to direct, evaluate, and validate AI-generated output.
• Experience designing and delivering customer‑facing systems that are scalable, reliable, observable, and maintainable.
• Strong programming experience in Go or a comparable backend language such as Python, Rust, or C++. Our team is using Go.
• Experience with distributed systems, event‑driven architectures, data pipelines, APIs, data modeling, or data‑intensive services.
• Familiarity with analytical, operational, or warehouse data stores such as ClickHouse, Postgres, Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Databricks, or equivalent technologies.
• Experience diagnosing production issues and improving system reliability through metrics, logs, traces, alerting, and other observability practices.
• Experience working in a cloud environment and with infrastructure‑as‑code or equivalent deployment and operations tooling.
• Ability to take an ambiguous problem from discovery and scoping through design, implementation, launch, and ongoing operation.
• Clear, thoughtful communication and a collaborative approach to working with technical and non‑technical partners.
• Experience with experimentation, A/B testing, analytics, data platforms, or similarly data‑intensive products.

Pay:

• 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**

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 [e-mail].

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