Principal Engineer

About the Job:

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 not just within Core Engineering, but 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:

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Partner with senior engineering leaders to define and articulate the architectural vision for the platform and establish an incremental path to realize it.

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Develop and steward a prioritized platform roadmap that balances strategic capability development, operational excellence, and technical debt management.

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Facilitate technical alignment across multiple engineering domains to ensure cohesive architecture and consistent execution standards.

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Drive core data models, abstractions, and foundational capabilities towards accelerating the development of new and existing products.

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Provide mentorship and guidance to engineering leaders to build organizational capability and support leadership development.

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Influence architectural direction and ensure technical excellence through active participation in design and code reviews.

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Champion a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration, and inclusion, with a focus on continuous learning and accountability.

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Monitor and evaluate emerging technologies and industry best practices to guide innovation and technical decision-making.

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Innovate on our interviewing practices and be a bar raiser when it comes to making candidate decisions.

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Champion efforts to experiment with AI engineering practices and drive education efforts to adopt meaningful practices with a focus on value over hype.

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As part of our you-build-it-you-run-it culture, all engineers are responsible for supporting applications in production, including on-call.

Qualifications:

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Principal-level leadership experience influencing beyond their domain, shaping cross-functional strategies and technical direction across the organization.

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Experience building and operating large-scale, production-grade web services.

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Experience building and operating data stores such as CockroachDB or Aurora PostgreSQL.

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Experience building serverless architecture as part of a larger service landscape.

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Experience building with different authentication and transport protocols such as OAuth and REST.

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Experience operating at the intersection of technical requirements and constraints, business priorities, and customer scale, and understanding how they all interplay.

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The ability to track and drive metrics, and the wisdom to understand what they can and can't tell you.

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Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

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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.

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].

Learn more about the interview process & what it’s like to work with LaunchDarkly's Product Delivery team!

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