We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead LaunchDarkly’s Data Platform team and help shape the high-throughput data backbone behind our most important products. As Engineering Manager, you’ll lead a technically deep team building and operating the systems that ingest, process, and serve the real-time and batch data powering Experimentation, Metrics, Observability, Release Guardian, AgentControl, and Data Export.
Working primarily in Go and Python, your team tackles ambitious distributed-systems challenges with technologies including Kinesis, Airflow, Athena, and Iceberg on S3, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Terraform, AWS, and Datadog. From evolving real-time analytics and context data to strengthening streaming and batch pipelines, you’ll guide the platform that turns vast volumes of events into reliable, customer-facing product experiences while partnering across Core Engineering and product teams to make data faster, more resilient, and more useful for every LaunchDarkly customer.
Responsibilities:Lead and develop a team of backend engineers, providing coaching, feedback, and career growth opportunities
Own the delivery, correctness, and resilience of Data Platform's production systems, including Tier 0 ingestion endpoints and the pipelines and data stores behind them
Partner with Product Management and consuming engineering teams to scope, estimate, and sequence roadmap work, making tradeoffs in real time
Act as the primary communicator and point of contact for Data Platform with engineering leadership, partner teams, and customers
Drive operational excellence: reliability, observability, cost, incident response, and on-call health
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
8+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years managing a team of backend or infrastructure engineers
Experience owning high-throughput, reliability-critical production systems such as event ingestion, streaming or batch pipelines, or large analytical data stores
Strong distributed-systems fundamentals and the judgment to guide technical tradeoffs with senior engineers
Proven ability to partner with Product Management to translate business goals into engineering plans with reliable estimates
Track record of coaching and developing engineers, including performance management, career growth planning, and technical mentorship
Strong communication skills in a distributed, cross-time-zone environment
Familiarity with observability practices (metrics, tracing, alerting, structured logging) and comfort leading production incident response
Experience with Go or Python, and with technologies such as Kafka or Kinesis, ClickHouse, Airflow, Athena or Iceberg, Elasticsearch, and Terraform is a plus
Pay:
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 2:
- 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**
- All Zones Inclusive of a 10% Bonus Target
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.
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 [email protected].
Do you need a disability accommodation?
Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance.
Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, LaunchDarkly recruiters will only contact you from @launchdarkly.com email addresses or via LinkedIn from "Verified Recruiter" accounts. Be cautious of emails from other domains. Legitimate LaunchDarkly recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before making a job offer. LaunchDarkly will never make a job offer without conducting a formal interview process. Our interview process does not involve asking detailed questions by email. If you are ever unsure about a communication that you receive, don't click any links—visit Careers | LaunchDarkly directly for confirmed job openings and links to apply.
Please notify us of any fraudulent representation by sending an email to [email protected].
Skills Required
- 8+ years of software engineering experience
- At least 2 years managing backend or infrastructure engineering teams
- Experience owning high-throughput, reliability-critical production systems
- Strong distributed-systems fundamentals
- Experience guiding technical tradeoffs with senior engineers
- Experience partnering with Product Management to translate business goals into engineering plans
- Proven ability to coach and develop engineers, including performance management and career growth planning
- Strong communication skills in distributed, cross-time-zone environments
- Familiarity with observability practices, including metrics, tracing, alerting, and structured logging
- Experience leading production incident response
- Experience with Go or Python
- Experience with Kafka or Kinesis, ClickHouse, Airflow, Athena or Iceberg, Elasticsearch, and Terraform
What We Do
LaunchDarkly isn’t just a leader in feature management — it’s the first scalable feature management platform. Feature management allows development teams to innovate faster by fundamentally transforming how software is delivered to customers. With the ability to gradually release new software features to any segment of users on any platform, DevOps teams can standardize safe releases at scale, accelerate their journey to the cloud and collaborate more effectively with business teams. Today, LaunchDarkly deploys peaks of 20 trillion feature flags a day, and that number continues to grow. Founded in 2014 in Oakland, California by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, LaunchDarkly has been named on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, InfoWorld’s 2021 Technology of the Year list, and the Enterprise Tech 30 list. 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.
Why Work With Us
We're Oakland-based but Remote-first and have one of the few women CEOs in our industry. Top reasons to work at LaunchDarkly: Great work/life balance and unlimited PTO, Awesome culture and human-centric values, Product is a "Need to have": Category leader in Feature Management, Competitive Pay and Healthcare Benefits, Pre-IPO Stock
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