Staff Engineer: Platform & AI Systems Leader

LaunchDarkly Group; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 183,000 - 251,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

RSUs

Health insurance

Vision & dental insurance

Mental health benefits

Job summary

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership beyond a single team. You will shape direction for critical systems or product areas, guiding complex initiatives and enabling other engineers to make strong decisions with confidence.

You may lead architecture across multiple teams, establish durable patterns, improve developer effectiveness, and help navigate significant technology or product changes.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Deep understanding of event-driven architectures, streaming protocols and stateful connection management at scale.
• Expertise in Go, Java, Rust or similar systems programming languages (LaunchDarkly uses Go and a bit of Rust).
• Experience delivering and operating production software at meaningful scale and reliability requirements.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across teams or organizations without formal authority.
• Ability to make architecture and design decisions for complex systems and communicate tradeoffs clearly.
• Track record turning ambiguous problems into aligned plans and shipped outcomes.
• Strong focus on software quality, observability, operational health, and security.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for complex, high-impact systems or cross-team initiatives.
• Lead architecture and design work to improve scalability, performance, reliability, and developer experience.
• Clarify ambiguous problems and identify highest-leverage opportunities for teams to act on.
• Partner with Product, Design, Engineering Managers, and senior leaders to connect technical investments to outcomes.
• Influence teams outside your area through strong technical proposals and inclusive decision-making.
• Improve engineering effectiveness via reusable patterns, documentation, mentoring, and process improvements.
• Contribute hands-on when needed to create leverage on critical projects.
• Represent customer needs and production realities in technical and product discussions.
• Develop other engineers through mentorship and growth opportunities.

Skills

Event-driven arch

Stateful connections

Go

Java

Rust

Production software

Technical leadership

Cross-team influence

Tools

Go

Rust

Job description

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership beyond a single team. You will shape direction for critical systems or product areas, guiding complex initiatives and enabling other engineers to make strong decisions with confidence.

You may lead architecture across multiple teams, establish durable patterns, improve developer effectiveness, and help navigate significant technology or product changes.