Backend Engineer, Observability

About the Job:

LaunchDarkly is looking for a Backend Engineer to help build and expand Vega, our AI-powered platform that surfaces insights and automates actions across LaunchDarkly products. This is a greenfield opportunity: you'll help evolve Vega from an Observability-focused assistant into a cross-product platform that serves Feature Management customers and powers a new, usage-based SKU.

You'll build the APIs, services, and agent infrastructure that make Vega and the whole Observability platform broadly valuable—enabling capabilities like AI-driven dashboard creation, flag cleanup automation, and safe, sandboxed agent execution. You'll work primarily in Go services and data pipelines at significant scale, and collaborate closely with product, design, and other engineering teams to shape how AI capabilities land across LaunchDarkly. Additionally, you'll work on other Enterprise-grade capabilities for the Observability platform to help drive customer activation and success.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and ship backend features across the Vega platform (APIs, Go services, agent infrastructure, and data pipelines)
• Own features end-to-end: from prototype and API design through production rollout and iteration
• Operate high-throughput data systems and keep them reliable, performant, and cost-efficient at scale
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and engineers across Observability and Feature Management
• Participate in architecture discussions and technical design reviews, contributing to sound trade-off decisions
• Write well-tested, maintainable code and promote best practices for quality, observability, and reliability
• Mentor teammates and contribute to a collaborative, high-trust engineering culture
• Participate in on-call rotations and take ownership of production reliability for your features

What You'll Work On

• Expand Vega beyond Observability into Feature Management, including the flag cleanup agent as a cross-product capability
• Design and operate safe, sandboxed AI agent execution infrastructure—isolation, resource limits, permissions, and auditability
• Support enterprise capabilities for the Observability platform: building data import and export pipelines to connect O11y to other platforms and enabling new customer workflows
• Build a platform that other teams can contribute to—defining contribution patterns, shared services, and APIs for agent capabilities
• Power dashboard creation via natural language prompts, extending existing Vega infrastructure with new tools, context, and evaluation
• Build the metering and usage pipelines that enable a usage-based monetization model for Vega
• Contribute to architecture decisions, code reviews, and engineering standards across the Observability and Vega teams

About You:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a track record of shipping production-quality backend systems
• Proficient in Go (or a similar language like Java, Rust, or C++) and experienced designing APIs and distributed services
• Experience building or integrating LLM-powered features, agents, or AI-driven workflows
• Experience with data-intensive systems—streaming pipelines, columnar stores (e.g., ClickHouse), or high-volume ingest is a strong plus
• Strong product instincts: you care about how your systems are used and can translate ambiguous requirements into clean, well-scoped solutions
• Collaborative and communicative—you work well across teams and functions, and you're comfortable navigating ambiguity
• Familiarity with LaunchDarkly, feature flagging, or observability tooling is a plus
• Experience with usage-based product surfaces, sandboxing/isolation technologies, or developer tooling is a plus

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.

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