Senior Backend Engineer, Data Platform

LaunchDarkly empowers teams to deliver and control software safely. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will build and operate distributed data infrastructure that moves, stores, and serves large volumes of product data across LaunchDarkly. Systems support customer-facing capabilities across Experimentation, Metrics, Release Guardian, Observability, AgentControl, and more. You will work on streaming and batch processing, analytical data stores, warehouse export infrastructure, and operational foundations. Technologies include Kinesis, Airflow, Spark, Lambda, Flink, Athena, ClickHouse, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Glue/Iceberg/S3, Terraform, and Datadog. You'll participate in an on-call rotation as part of a you-build-it-you-run-it culture.

• Design, build, and operate distributed, data-intensive backend systems.
• Own and improve production data infrastructure including streaming and batch pipelines, analytical data stores, warehouse export systems, observability, alerting, reliability, and performance.
• Debug and resolve complex production issues, including on-call.
• Partner with product managers, frontend engineers, UX designers, and other teams.
• Write and review technical proposals, contribute to architecture decisions, and improve engineering standards, testing, deployment safety, and tooling.
• Write maintainable, well-tested code and participate in code reviews and design reviews.

• 6+ years of professional backend software engineering experience with infrastructure, data platform, distributed systems, or data-intensive production systems.
• Experience designing, building, operating, and debugging reliable production systems that move, store, process, or query large volumes of data.
• Hands-on experience with data pipeline, streaming, orchestration, or batch-processing technologies such as Kinesis, Airflow, Spark, Lambda, Flink, Athena, Kafka, or equivalent.
• Experience with analytical, event, warehouse, or operational data stores such as ClickHouse, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Timestream, Glue/Iceberg/S3, Redshift, Databricks, or equivalent.
• Strong programming in Go, Python, SQL, Scala, or similar.
• Familiarity with distributed systems fundamentals such as concurrency, data modeling, failure handling, retries, idempotency, partitioning, backpressure, and high-throughput processing.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform and observability tools like Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent.
• Strong ownership mindset for production systems.

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones for Level 4: Zone 1 (SF/Bay Area, NYC, Boston, Seattle): $187,000 - $257,000; Zone 2 (Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago): $168,000 - $231,000; Zone 3 (all other US locations): $158,000 - $218,000. Exact compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location. RSUs, health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits.

LaunchDarkly is a Feature Management Platform that serves over 20 Trillion feature flags daily to help software teams build better software, faster. Feature flagging is an industry standard methodology. LaunchDarkly has SDKs for all major web and mobile platforms. We are an equal opportunity employer.