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LaunchdarklyLaunchdarklyUnited States

Staff Engineer – Distributed Systems – Flag Delivery

Leads architecture and operation of LaunchDarkly’s globally distributed Flag Delivery Network, delivering real-time feature flag updates with low latency and high availability. Requires staff-level technical leadership, 10+ years of experience, and deep expertise in distributed systems, streaming, cloud infrastructure, and operational excellence.

183k – 295k/yr
Remote10+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Architect, design, and build resilient, scalable systems for delivering feature flag data globally, optimized for high availability and low latency.
  • Own and evolve the global edge delivery network, streaming infrastructure, and data synchronization protocols.
  • Improve system availability, performance, and operational excellence by identifying bottlenecks and designing for failure.
  • Collaborate with infrastructure, SDK, product, and security teams to deliver seamless and secure customer experiences.
  • Mentor and lead engineers through best practices in distributed systems development, code quality, and systems thinking.
  • Lead incident response and post-incident reviews while improving system reliability and observability.
  • Participate in an on-call rotation and own the uptime and reliability of services.

Requirements

  • 10+ years of relevant industry experience architecting, building, and operating large-scale backend and infrastructure services, with extensive hands-on distributed systems experience.
  • Deep understanding of event-driven architectures, streaming protocols such as Server-Sent Events and WebSockets, and stateful connection management at scale.
  • Expertise in Go, Java, Rust, or similar systems programming languages.
  • Familiarity with real-time data pipelines, load balancing, and global edge networks/CDNs.
  • Experience with monitoring, observability, operational excellence, robust telemetry, actionable alerting, SLOs, low latency, and high availability.
  • Experience operating cloud systems using infrastructure-as-code tools, including AWS or GCP.
  • Experience with distributed data stores and caching systems such as Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka, and Varnish.
  • Proven technical leadership, including setting direction, breaking down complex problems, and influencing outcomes across teams.

Compensation and Benefits

  • Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle — $214,800–$295,350.
  • Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago — $193,400–$265,870.
  • Zone 3: All other US locations — $182,600–$251,020.
  • Compensation may vary based on skills, experience, and location.
  • Benefits include restricted stock units, health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.

Skills

GoJavaRustserver-sent eventsWebSocketsDistributed SystemsAWSGCPInfrastructure As CodeRedisDynamoDBKafkavarnishObservabilityload balancing

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