Backend Software Engineer, SDK

About LaunchDarkly Engineering

LaunchDarkly helps engineering organizations ship software and AI with speed, safety, and control. Our platform gives teams the confidence to release gradually, target experiences to the right audiences, learn through experimentation, understand what is happening in production, and respond quickly when risk appears.

Our engineers build the systems, services, SDKs, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and product experiences that make this possible. The work spans high-scale distributed systems, reliable data and event pipelines, intuitive enterprise workflows, and AI-powered capabilities that help teams manage the next generation of software delivery.

LaunchDarkly’s SDKs are used in systems that perform trillions of feature flag evaluations each day, giving our engineering work a direct connection to the reliability and customer experience of software around the world. As the company grows, we are expanding beyond traditional feature management into experimentation, observability, and AgentControl—helping customers control more of the software and AI lifecycle. That creates an unusually broad set of technical challenges, visible customer impact, and room for engineers to shape what comes next.

We believe in the power of teams. We work with humility, openness, curiosity, and care; we value clear communication, thoughtful technical judgment, inclusive collaboration, and a strong sense of ownership. We encourage people to apply even when they do not meet every qualification listed below. We are interested in the experience, perspective, and potential you would bring to the role.

About the Job

As a Software Engineer on LaunchDarkly’s SDK team, you will build the primary touchpoint that our customers interact with on a daily basis. You’ll work with multiple technologies across our 35+ SDKs while enabling customers of all kinds to feature flag their code. When working on our SDKs, you’d be contributing to much more than thin client wrappers. Our SDKs are feature-rich agents with strong emphases on performance, concurrency, and resiliency -- all while following idiomatic practices for their tech stack.

LaunchDarkly serves trillions of feature flags daily to customers all around the globe, and every flag is handled by our SDKs. This team has a major impact not only on our company, but on our customers (and their customers). We are growing fast and we need your help writing the next chapter in our story.

Responsibilities:

• Contribute to development for SDKs in supported platforms:

  • Implement new features and improvements to meet customer performance and resiliency requirements

  • Keep up to date with the latest development practices

• Collaborate with our engineering and product teams to drive the implementation and release of major features

• Actively maintain our open-source repositories

• Identify areas of improvement and advocate for best practices

• Have an active voice in shaping both technology and product decisions

Basic Qualifications:

• Demonstrable experience building libraries and packages used by other developers

• Polyglot background with an ability to context switch between languages quickly

• 5+ years experience with at least two of the following: .NET/Go/Ruby/Python/NodeJS/Java

• Experience with the following is a plus:

  • C++/Erlang/Haskell/Lua

  • AI SDKs

  • Observability SDKs

  • Mobile development

• Strong computer science fundamentals

• Committed to working in a communicative, collaborative environment

• Self‐starter and problem solver, willing to solve difficult problems and work independently when necessary

• Strong testing background: experience building unit, integration, load tests, and benchmarks

• Experience writing production-ready code with emphasis on quality and maintainability

• Experience contributing to open-source software

Logistics:

• This is a remote role, with opportunities to visit the office in the Bay Area, California, for team offsites

• The SDK team is spread between Eastern and Pacific time zones

Highlights:

• You will work collaboratively with a team of highly experienced engineers who are amazing at the craft of engineering and building SDKs

• Your contributions will be publicly visible as the SDK team develops LaunchDarkly’s open-source SDKs in public

• LaunchDarkly uses our own SDKs. You will have opportunities working with the other teams within LaunchDarkly

• In this role, you can learn about many programming languages and frameworks

• You will have opportunities to strongly influence roadmap and prioritization

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 3:

• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $171,200 - $235,400**
• Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $154,100 - $211,860 **
• Zone 3: All other US locations - $145,500 - $200,090 **

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 hr@launchdarkly.com. 

Do you need a disability accommodation?

Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance. 

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, LaunchDarkly recruiters will only contact you from @launchdarkly.com email addresses or via LinkedIn from "Verified Recruiter" accounts. Be cautious of emails from other domains.  Legitimate LaunchDarkly recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before making a job offer. LaunchDarkly will never make a job offer without conducting a formal interview process. Our interview process does not involve asking detailed questions by email. If you are ever unsure about a communication that you receive, don't click any links—visit Careers | LaunchDarkly  directly for confirmed job openings and links to apply.

Please notify us of any fraudulent representation by sending an email to careers@launchdarkly.com.