Senior Backend Engineer, Data Platform

About the role

Join our Data Platform team to architect and maintain the distributed infrastructure that manages high volumes of product data. You will support core product features including Experimentation, Metrics, Observability, and Release Guardian by managing both streaming and batch processing systems. In this capacity, you will own the design decisions that underpin how event and metric data flows through our ecosystem, ensuring that the platform remains robust and extensible. You will be responsible for translating ambiguous product requirements into scalable backend solutions that meet stringent reliability standards. This role requires deep collaboration with cross-functional partners to align technical execution with business outcomes. You will continuously evaluate new technologies and patterns to improve the efficiency and resilience of our data infrastructure. Ultimately, you will act as a technical steward for the platform, safeguarding its integrity as it scales to meet growing organizational demands.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Architect and implement backend services that ingest, process, and serve high-volume product telemetry and event data.
• Design and operate data-intensive backend systems that support product-wide capabilities across the LaunchDarkly portfolio.
• Manage production infrastructure, including analytical stores, warehouse exports, and streaming pipelines that ensure timely data delivery.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues across databases and cloud services as part of an on-call rotation to maintain system uptime.
• Collaborate with product managers, frontend teams, and designers to deliver reliable data features that meet functional and performance requirements.
• Contribute to architectural strategy and technical proposals while balancing scalability, cost, and performance tradeoffs.
• Enhance engineering standards, deployment safety, and observability for all platform systems through automation and best practices.
• Produce clean, tested code and actively participate in design and code reviews to uphold quality across the engineering organization.
• Partner with data scientists and analysts to optimize data structures for querying performance and cost efficiency.
• Implement monitoring and alerting strategies that provide clear insight into system health and potential bottlenecks.
• Evaluate and integrate streaming, batch, and orchestration tools to select the best fit for evolving product needs.
• Document system behaviors and operational runbooks to ensure continuity and enable effective knowledge transfer.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional backend engineering experience, specifically with distributed or data-heavy production systems that require careful architectural oversight.
• Proven ability to build and debug systems that store, process, and query large datasets while maintaining strict reliability and performance targets.
• Hands-on experience with streaming, batch, or orchestration tools like Kinesis, Airflow, Spark, Lambda, Flink, or Kafka in production environments.
• Experience with analytical or event-based data stores such as ClickHouse, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Timestream, or Glue/Iceberg/S3 to support diverse query patterns.
• Proficiency in backend languages such as Go, Python, SQL, or Scala to implement efficient and maintainable services.
• Deep understanding of distributed system fundamentals like concurrency, partitioning, backpressure, and idempotency to anticipate and mitigate systemic risks.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and observability platforms (Datadog) to manage infrastructure lifecycle and performance insights.
• Strong sense of ownership regarding production reliability and operational excellence, with a proactive approach to identifying and resolving potential issues.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with the specific tools and domains mentioned in the Skills & tools section to reduce onboarding time.
• Experience contributing to data platform products that serve internal and external customers at scale.
• Understanding of compliance and data governance considerations relevant to handling product telemetry.

Practical notes

• 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
• Benefits include RSUs, health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health support.
• Disability accommodations can be requested via the official careers page form.
• Protect yourself from recruitment scams: only communicate with @launchdarkly.com email addresses and never provide banking info or fees before an offer.

About the company

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.