Senior Backend Engineer - Scale, Observability & AI

Cervin; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 192,000 - 264,000; Full time

Job summary

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and operate services powering reliable software delivery across customer experiences and product teams. You will own complex backend work from problem definition through production, collaborating with Product, Design, Staff Engineers, and other teams to deliver scalable solutions.

You will tackle APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines, SDK infrastructure, and platform capabilities, influencing technical direction and

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building and operating production software.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, testing, debugging, API design, and distributed-systems concepts.
• Deep experience with a backend language such as Go, Python, Rust, or an equivalent language. (Most of our teams use Go)
• Experience designing systems that must remain reliable, observable, secure, and maintainable as usage, complexity, and team ownership grow.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technical projects with ambiguous requirements, multiple stakeholders, or cross-team dependencies.
• Sound judgment when evaluating architecture, technology choices, operational risk, and short- versus long-term tradeoffs.
• Ability to explain complex technical decisions clearly and build alignment with technical and non-technical partners.
• Experience mentoring engineers and strengthening team practices through feedback, documentation, pairing, or technical leadership.
• A strong sense of ownership for production outcomes and downstream customer impact.
• Comfort learning unfamiliar systems and navigating changing priorities with curiosity and a collaborative mindset.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and delivery of large or ambiguous backend projects, breaking them into clear milestones and creating alignment with partners.
• Design, implement, test, and operate production services and APIs that are scalable, secure, observable, and maintainable.
• Make and communicate thoughtful tradeoffs across scalability, performance, reliability, security, maintainability, cost, and delivery speed.
• Identify architectural risks, performance bottlenecks, operational gaps, and sources of technical friction; then drive durable improvements.
• Improve the observability and operability of the systems you own, including metrics, logs, traces, alerting, service-level objectives, and incident follow-through.
• Collaborate with Product, Design, Support, Customer Success, and other engineering teams to understand needs and deliver measurable customer outcomes.
• Influence technical direction through design documents, architecture discussions, code reviews, and clear written and verbal communication.
• Mentor engineers, raise the quality of technical decision-making, and contribute to a culture of inclusive collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Participate in production support and incident response with calm ownership, turning operational lessons into lasting improvements.
• Help evolve engineering practices, reusable patterns, and developer experiences that make other teams more effective.

Skills

Go

Python

Rust

Distributed systems

API design

Observability

Mentoring

Ownership

Cross-team collaboration

Communication

Job description

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to design, build, and operate services powering reliable software delivery across customer experiences and product teams. You will own complex backend work from problem definition through production, collaborating with Product, Design, Staff Engineers, and other teams to deliver scalable solutions.

You will tackle APIs, distributed systems, data pipelines, SDK infrastructure, and platform capabilities, influencing technical direction and