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.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Design and operate data-intensive backend systems that support product-wide capabilities.
• Manage production infrastructure, including analytical stores, warehouse exports, and streaming pipelines.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues across databases and cloud services as part of an on-call rotation.
• Collaborate with product managers, frontend teams, and designers to deliver reliable data features.
• Contribute to architectural strategy and technical proposals while balancing scalability, cost, and performance.
• Enhance engineering standards, deployment safety, and observability for all platform systems.
• Produce clean, tested code and engage in design and code reviews.

Requirements

• 6+ years of professional backend engineering experience, specifically with distributed or data-heavy production systems.
• Proven ability to build and debug systems that store, process, and query large datasets.
• Hands-on experience with streaming, batch, or orchestration tools like Kinesis, Airflow, Spark, Lambda, Flink, or Kafka.
• Experience with analytical or event-based data stores such as ClickHouse, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Timestream, or Glue/Iceberg/S3.
• Proficiency in backend languages such as Go, Python, SQL, or Scala.
• Deep understanding of distributed system fundamentals like concurrency, partitioning, backpressure, and idempotency.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) and observability platforms (Datadog).
• Strong sense of ownership regarding production reliability and operational excellence.

Skills & tools

• Languages: Go, Python, SQL, Scala
• Data/Streaming: Kinesis, Airflow, Spark, Lambda, Flink, Athena, Kafka
• Storage: ClickHouse, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Timestream, Glue/Iceberg/S3
• Infrastructure/Ops: Terraform, Datadog

Practical notes

• Compensation is based on geographic zones:
• 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.