Backend Engineer, Flag Delivery

Responsibilities

• Build, improve, and operate backend services that power LaunchDarkly’s Flag Delivery systems.
• Contribute to systems that support streaming and polling delivery models for LaunchDarkly SDKs.
• Debug production issues, improve service reliability, and help the team maintain strong standards around latency, availability, observability, and operability.
• Work with technologies and patterns common to modern distributed backend systems, including caching layers, network services, concurrency, failure handling, and cloud infrastructure.
• Collaborate closely with partner teams including SDK, Platform, SRE, Security, and Enterprise to deliver improvements across the broader platform.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and take ownership of the systems you help build.
• Learn the existing architecture deeply and make pragmatic improvements that increase system clarity, performance, and maintainability.
• Use AI as part of your engineering workflow with sound judgment, including knowing when to use it, how to direct it effectively, and how to verify or reject its output.
• Reason clearly about code, architecture, and whole-system behavior even when AI is in the loop.

Requirements

• 5+ years of backend software engineering experience.
• Experience building or operating production backend systems.
• Strong programming skills in Go, Java, Rust, or a similar backend language (team primarily uses Go, with some Rust).
• Clear, existing AI usage in engineering work.
• Ability to use AI without surrendering technical judgment.
• Familiarity with distributed systems fundamentals such as caching, concurrency, failure modes, and reliability.
• Experience debugging production issues and using observability to understand system behavior.
• Ability to reason clearly about code, architecture, and system behavior.
• Strong learning orientation and comfort working with senior engineers.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work well across engineering teams.
• Willingness to participate in on-call and production support.

Nice-to-Haves

• Kind, coachable, and excited to learn from senior engineers.
• Enjoy understanding how real systems behave in production.
• Curious about scale, failure, caching, delivery, and operability.
• Energized by debugging, tradeoffs, and steadily improving systems over time.
• Bring real backend or infrastructure ownership, not just feature implementation.
• Care about writing software that is maintainable, observable, and dependable.