Senior Director of Engineering

About the Job:

LaunchDarkly is looking for a Director of Core Engineering to lead our foundational engineering teams. The Core Engineering group builds and scales the infrastructure, systems, services and frameworks that power our feature management platform. The group also invests in improving internal developer tooling and overall service architecture. Your work will make it possible for thousands of our customers as well as every LaunchDarkly engineering team to innovate quickly, reliably and performantly.This role is a great fit for a leader who has scaled distributed systems, reduced complexity in technical systems, built inclusive and high-performing teams, and enjoys empowering others todo their best work. You’ll set direction and drive execution for the Core Engineering organization while collaborating across Product, Design, and Engineering leadership to ensure our platform is resilient, scalable, and ready for the future.

Responsibilities:

• Vision, Strategy, Execution: Guide engineering strategy, define roadmap and drive execution for core infrastructure, APIs, SDKs and services that power every single LaunchDarkly product; connect efforts to business outcomes
• Technical Excellence: Raise the bar and champion best practices in distributed systems, SDK experience, developer workflows, data platform, technical design, performance, scalability, reliability; ensure we are ready for the future
• Cross-functional Leadership: Partner with product and engineering leaders across Feature Management, Release Observability, AI, Experimentation and Product Analytics and other groups to deliver seamless platform-wide experiences; delight customers with a consistent experience.
• Organizational Building: Hire, mentor and support multiple engineering teams, fostering an inclusive culture where everyone can grow, thrive with autonomy and advance their careers; build a leadership bench.
• Principled Values: Model and evangelize a leadership style rooted in transparency, ownership, curiosity and a bias for action; be a culture champion

About You:

• An experienced (typically 10+ years) domain expert with proven experience architecting large-scale systems and developer-centric workflows
• A seasoned people leader with experience managing managers, senior engineers and growing next generation of leaders
• A cross-functional collaborator with experience working with Product, Design, GTM, customers, vendors to shape technical strategy, influence product strategy, and win customers
• A strategic thinker who connects engineering decisions to business goals and customer outcomes
• A clear communicator who can negotiate and coordinate broad technical investment efforts across several sets of teams, communicating at the right level with teams, peers, and executive leadership
• A culture carrier who brings awareness, humility and a learning mindset to the table and can infuse those values in your teams.
• A talent magnet with a demonstrated commitment to building inclusive, diverse teams that operate with high agency and autonomy.

Qualifications:

• 10+ years in engineering leadership positions, including 3+yrs in a Director+ role leading multiple teams and products
• Experiences with reasoning about large scale distributed systems architectures, understanding data flows from SDKs to delivery network to data platforms and back
• Good understanding of cloud native architectures and pragmatic approach to technical debt, migrations, and technical evolutions
• Prior experience scaling teams and building strong partnerships with product, design, GTM, customers, vendors in a growing company

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level M5: 

• 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 15% 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.

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 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.