Staff Engineer, Distributed Systems

About the Job:

As a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer on LaunchDarkly’s Flag Delivery Network (FDN) team, you’ll play a critical role in shaping one of the most high-performance, globally distributed systems powering modern software delivery. The FDN is responsible for delivering real-time feature flag updates to tens of millions of connected SDKs across web, mobile, and server environments—at a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of updates per second. This infrastructure is a mission-critical part of our platform, and your work will directly impact the performance, reliability, and safety of software rollouts for some of the world’s most innovative engineering teams.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives on building low-latency, high-availability systems at scale. You’ll architect and evolve the systems behind our global edge delivery infrastructure, collaborate with SDK and platform teams, and lead initiatives that push the boundaries of what’s possible in edge computing and real-time data propagation.

You’ll be expected to lead by example—driving operational excellence, mentoring teammates, and owning systems throughout their lifecycle, including being part of the on-call rotation. This is a staff-level role where deep technical experience, a systems-thinking mindset, and a bias for action are critical.

If you’re passionate about distributed systems, excited by global-scale engineering challenges, and motivated by a strong sense of ownership, this is the job for you.

Responsibilities:

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Architect, design, and build resilient and scalable systems for delivering feature flag data globally, optimized for high availability and low latency — single-digit milliseconds within regions.

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Own and evolve core components such as our global edge delivery network, streaming infrastructure, and data synchronization protocols.

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Drive improvements in system availability, performance, and operational excellence by identifying bottlenecks and designing for failure.

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Collaborate cross-functionally with infrastructure, SDK, product, and security teams to deliver seamless and secure customer experiences.

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Mentor and lead other engineers by modeling best practices in distributed systems development, code quality, and systems thinking.

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Take initiative in incident response and post-incident reviews, continually improving system reliability and observability.

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Participate in an on-call rotation for the services you help build, and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and accountability for their uptime and reliability.

Qualifications:

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Proven experience in architecting, building, and operating complex, large-scale backend and infrastructure services, with a multi-year, hands-on focus specifically on distributed systems. This level of expertise is typically found in engineers with 10+ years of relevant industry experience.

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Deep understanding of event-driven architectures, streaming protocols (e.g., Server-Sent Events, WebSockets), and stateful connection management at scale.

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Expertise in Go, Java, Rust or similar systems programming languages. (We use Go and a little bit of Rust.)

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Familiarity with real-time data pipelines, load balancing, and global edge networks/CDNs.

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Proven experience in monitoring, observability, and operational excellence — designing systems with robust telemetry and actionable alerting to meet SLOs for low latency and high availability.

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Experience operating systems in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP) using infrastructure-as-code tools

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Experience working with distributed data stores and caching systems (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka, Varnish and similar).

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Proven history of technical leadership: setting direction, breaking down complex problems, and influencing outcomes across teams.

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level P5:

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Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or New York City Metropolitan Area: $209,000 - $287,000**

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Zone 2: Boston, DC, Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Seattle: $188,000 - $259,000**

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Zone 3: All other US locations: $177,000 - $244,000**

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].

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