We’re looking for a Principal Engineer to drive the vision and execution of our Core Engineering teams and to provide leadership across our entire engineering organization. Core Engineering is responsible for LaunchDarkly’s platform layer spanning core shared services (e.g. our internal orchestration engine) and our service platform layer (e.g. Kubernetes). In this role, you would have a wide impact on shaping the current state and north star for engineering architecture and practice at LaunchDarkly. Areas of focus would range from deployments, authentication, core services across products, data models and stores, AI engineering and beyond. You would work cross-functionally at the intersection of business priorities, customer scale, and technical requirements and constraints.
This is a unique opportunity to have an immediate and ongoing organization-wide impact.
Responsibilities:Along with other senior engineering leaders, clearly articulate a vision for the LaunchDarkly service architecture and an incremental path to get there.
Define and maintain a prioritized platform roadmap that balances capability delivery, operational health, and bug fixing. In order to do so effectively, you must deeply understand the opportunities and pain points within LaunchDarkly’s engineering team.
Be the connective tissue between engineering teams across multiple products, domains, and technologies.
Coach, mentor, and grow engineering leaders across the organization.
Guide architectural decisions and contribute to code reviews and technical designs.
Foster a culture of collaboration, ownership, continuous learning, and inclusivity.
Stay current with technologies and software development trends, and drive their adoption where appropriate.
As part of our you-build-it-you-run-it culture, all engineers may be responsible of support applications in production, including on-call.
5+ years operating at a Staff+ level focused on building and operating production-grade web services.
Experience building and operating data stores such as CockroachDB or Aurora PostgreSQL.
Experience building serverless architecture as part of a larger service landscape.
Experience building with different authentication and transport protocols such as OAuth and REST.
Experience operating at the intersection of technical requirements and constraints, business priorities, and customer scale, and understanding how they all interplay.
The ability to track and drive metrics, and the wisdom to understand what they can and can't tell you.
Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
A thoughtful, empathetic approach to leadership and collaboration.
Pay:
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 6:
- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $262,000 - $361,000**
- Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $236,400 - $325,000**
- Zone 3: All other US locations - $223,000 - $307,000**
- Inclusive of 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].
Learn more about the interview process & what it’s like to work with LaunchDarkly's Product Delivery team!
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Top Skills
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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