Senior Engineering Manager, SDKs

Cervin; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 205,000 - 281,000; Full time

Job summary

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the SDK team, the core developer experience across all platforms. You will guide a senior, polyglot team responsible for 35+ open-source SDKs, OpenFeature providers, and related tooling, ensuring performance, resilience, and idiomatic usage across languages and ecosystems.

You’ll partner with Product Management to shape the SDK and Relay Proxy roadmap, manage release quality, and mentor engineers.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a formal engineering management role
• Leading teams that build developer-facing software (SDKs, client libraries, public APIs, open-source)
• Familiarity with multiple programming languages and ecosystems
• Ability to prioritize across stakeholders with Product Management
• Coaching and developing senior engineers, including performance management

Responsibilities

• Lead and develop a team of senior engineers with coaching and career growth
• Own SDK portfolio prioritization, balancing feature work, maintenance, security, and escalations
• Partner with Product Management to define SDK/Relay Proxy roadmap and deprecation policy
• Guide language/platform tradeoffs while keeping SDKs idiomatic, performant, resilient
• Represent SDK engineering with customers, Support, Solutions, Sales and leadership

Skills

Engineering management

Polyglot teams

Developer tooling

Open source

Communication

Job description

About the Job:

We’re looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the SDK team, the team behind LaunchDarkly’s developer experience across every platform. The team builds and maintains 35+ open-source SDKs, along with OpenFeature providers, event-streaming libraries, contract tests, release tooling, and the Relay Proxy. This is the code developers integrate directly into their applications and the primary way customers experience LaunchDarkly day-to-day.

Our SDKs are feature-rich agents that bring LaunchDarkly’s capabilities into a wide range of languages, frameworks, and platforms, with a deep focus on performance, concurrency, resiliency, and idiomatic developer experiences. Trillions of feature flag evaluations run through code this team ships, giving the team an unusually direct impact on how safely and confidently engineering organizations deliver software.

You’ll lead a senior, polyglot team working at the intersection of developer tooling, distributed systems, open source, and the next generation of software delivery. It’s an opportunity to shape a highly visible portfolio, influence how developers (including AI-assisted developers) integrate with LaunchDarkly, and help define what great developer infrastructure looks like at scale.

This is a role with real technical and organizational scope: you’ll help set priorities across a large, long-lived ecosystem; guide decisions around compatibility, versioning, release quality, and resilience; and grow a team whose work is public, widely used, and central to LaunchDarkly’s product experience

Responsibilities:

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


• Own prioritization and intake for the SDK portfolio, balancing feature work, maintenance, security, and customer escalations across 35+ SDKs and the Relay Proxy


• Partner with Product Management to define and deliver the SDK and Relay Proxy roadmap, including version support and deprecation policy


• Guide technical tradeoffs across languages and platforms, and help the team keep our SDKs idiomatic, performant, and resilient


• Represent SDK engineering with customers, Support, Solutions, and Sales, and communicate roadmaps, risks, and progress clearly to engineering leadership


• Drive operational excellence in release quality, observability, and incident response for SDKs and the Relay Proxy


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


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

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of experience in a formal engineering management role, including managing senior engineers


• Experience leading teams that build developer-facing software: SDKs, client libraries, public APIs, or open-source projects used by external developers


• Working familiarity with several programming languages and ecosystems, and the judgment to guide technical tradeoffs in a polyglot codebase


• Proven ability to prioritize across many stakeholders and to partner with Product Management to translate business goals into engineering plans with reliable estimates


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


• Excellent communication skills with technical and non-technical stakeholders, including customers


• Familiarity with observability practices and comfort with production incident response


• Experience contributing to or maintaining open-source software is a plus

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level M3:

• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $240,600 - $330,700**


• Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $216,500 - $297,600**


• Zone 3: All other US locations - $204,500 - $281,100**

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

Do you need a disability accommodation?

Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance.

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