Backend Engineer

About the Job:

LaunchDarkly is seeking a Backend Engineer to help build the foundational capabilities that power how new developers discover, adopt, and succeed with the LaunchDarkly platform.

The Foundation team owns the first mile of the developer journey. We focus on how developers discover LaunchDarkly, get started quickly, and realize value early. This includes onboarding flows, core developer experiences, and the systems that support growth and learning at scale.

By building thoughtful, reliable backend systems that support usability, experimentation, and iteration, the team helps turn initial interest into long-term adoption. Our work directly shapes developers’ first impressions of LaunchDarkly and plays a critical role in driving sustainable product growth.

In this role, you will partner closely with product, design, and other engineering teams to build backend services in Go, design APIs that support onboarding and growth workflows, and evolve the core systems that enable fast iteration and experimentation.

You will work on real-world problems at scale, balancing speed and reliability while building systems that are flexible, observable, and easy to evolve. Your work will have a direct impact on how developers experience LaunchDarkly from their very first interaction.

Responsibilities:

• Build and maintain scalable backend services and APIs that power onboarding, growth, and core developer experiences within LaunchDarkly.

• Contribute to technical solutions that improve time to value, usability, and early retention for new developers adopting the platform.

• Work closely with product managers, designers, and engineers to define and implement end-to-end features that support experimentation, iteration, and learning.

• Participate in architecture and design discussions, offering thoughtful input and collaborating with senior engineers to make well-reasoned trade-offs between speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.

• Collaborate with internal stakeholders and other LaunchDarkly teams to understand developer needs and improve foundational workflows across the product.

• Follow and promote best practices for backend development, testing, and observability, contributing to a strong culture of engineering quality.

• Take ownership of code in production, participate in on-call rotations, and help improve the reliability, scalability, and clarity of our systems over time.

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional experience in backend software development, with a track record of contributing to well-designed, maintainable systems.

• Experience working on scalable, reliable services that support product growth, user-facing workflows, or platform foundations.

• Proficiency in Go along with experience in another modern programming language, with the ability and willingness to learn new technologies as needed. Our team primarily writes services in Go.

• Experience building and consuming APIs that support product workflows, experimentation, or system integration.

• Solid understanding of system design and domain modeling, with exposure to building reusable components or internal platforms.

• Familiarity with observability concepts such as metrics, tracing, structured logging, and debugging in distributed systems.

• A collaborative engineer who takes ownership of outcomes, communicates clearly, and works effectively in cross-functional teams.

• Interest in improving developer experience and product adoption through thoughtful system design, iteration, and experimentation.

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. 

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].