Staff Engineer (Multiple Positions)

Overview

Individual contributor Staff Engineer role providing technical leadership beyond a single team, setting direction for complex, high-impact systems, products, or cross-team initiatives at LaunchDarkly.

What you'll do

• Set technical direction for complex, high-impact systems, products, or cross-team initiatives.
• Lead architecture and design work that improves scalability, performance, reliability, security, operability, and developer experience.
• Clarify ambiguous problems, identify the highest-leverage opportunities, and help teams make timely, well-informed decisions.
• Partner with Product, Design, Engineering Managers, and senior leaders to connect technical investments to customer and business outcomes.
• Influence teams outside your immediate area through strong technical proposals, inclusive decision-making, and clear communication.
• Improve engineering effectiveness through reusable patterns, paved paths, documentation, mentoring, and thoughtful process improvements.
• Contribute directly to critical projects when hands-on technical work is the best way to create leverage.
• Represent customer needs and production realities in technical and product discussions.
• Develop other engineers through mentorship, feedback, and opportunities to grow their scope.

What you'll need

• This level of expertise is typically found in engineers with 10+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Deep understanding of event-driven architectures, streaming protocols (e.g., Server-Sent Events, WebSockets), and stateful connection management at scale.
• Expertise in Go, Java, Rust or similar systems programming languages.
• Significant experience delivering and operating production software, including systems or products with meaningful scale, complexity, or reliability requirements.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across team or organizational boundaries, without relying on formal authority.
• Experience making architecture and design decisions for complex systems and communicating the tradeoffs clearly.
• A track record of turning ambiguous, high-impact problems into aligned plans and shipped outcomes.
• Strong understanding of software quality, observability, operational health, security, and sustainable delivery practices.
• Ability to balance long-term technical direction with pragmatic, incremental execution.
• A collaborative leadership style grounded in curiosity, inclusion, clear communication, and respect for different perspectives.

Details

• Location: Remote, US.
• Individual contributor role; leads through expertise, communication, and influence rather than people management.
• Pay zones (Level 5): Zone 1 (San Francisco/Bay Area, 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.
• Benefits include RSUs, health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits.