Senior Backend Engineer, Observability

About the Job:

LaunchDarkly is looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join our Observability team, delivering best-in-class telemetry to help engineers monitor, analyze, and debug their applications in real time. Our mission is to redefine software release and reliability by automating end-to-end processes, measuring the real-time impact of feature rollouts, and simplifying incident diagnosis when things go wrong. From code-level tracing to browser user journeys, these signals form the backbone of safe, data-driven releases. You’ll help shape the foundation of how our customers understand and optimize their feature rollouts, building systems that are performant, reliable, and easy to operate at massive scale.

Our work spans everything from collecting raw telemetry to transforming and enriching it, storing it cost-effectively, and exposing high-fidelity metrics and visualizations. You’ll partner closely with product teams to ensure we’re delivering insights that matter, all while helping scale our data ingestion pipeline to handle trillions of events per day.

If you’re passionate about observability, distributed systems, and empowering engineering teams with real-time data at massive scale, we’d love to have you join us.

Responsibilities:

• 
  

  Build out the next-generation ingestion pipeline for OpenTelemetry metrics, traces, and logs, capable of processing high throughput with low latency.



• 
  

  Tune and optimize distributed data systems (e.g., Kafka, ClickHouse) to ensure resilience, throughput, and cost-efficiency.



• 
  

  Drive features from conception through production: write prototypes, define APIs, build robust services, and validate correctness in production.



• 
  

  Collaborate on OpenTelemetry SDK enhancements to help customers emit the right signals.



• 
  

  Work hand-in-hand with product managers, UX designers, and frontend engineers to deliver customer-facing metrics capabilities.



• 
  

  Actively mentor and support colleagues across the organization



• 
  

  Actively participate in code reviews, spec reviews, and architecture design



• 
  

  Contribute to the improvement of engineering standards, tooling, and processes across the technology organization.

Qualifications:

• 
  

  8+ years of Application Backend Software Engineering experience



• 
  

  Extensive experience with server-side programming languages (e.g. Go, Node. js , Python)



• 
  

  Deep understanding of data pipelines, message brokers (e.g., Kafka), and storage engines (e.g. ClickHouse).



• 
  

  Experience using AI tooling to accelerate daily software development (e.g. Cursor, Devin, Glean). Familiarity with frontend prototyping tools (v0, Lovable, Bolt) is a plus, especially in the context of full-stack web development.



• 
  

  Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry or other observability frameworks, including metric aggregation, tracing, and log collection.



• 
  

  Proven track record of designing and maintaining GraphQL or RESTful or APIs that serve thousands of requests per second.



• 
  

  Familiar with capacity planning, horizontal scaling, performance tuning, and production-grade reliability practices.



• 
  

  Strong grasp of algorithms, data structures, concurrency, and distributed consensus.



• 
  

  Excellent communication skills, with a passion for partnering across functions to solve complex problems.



• 
  

  Self-driven, curious about emerging observability technologies, and committed to continuous learning and improvement.

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level P4:

• 
  

  Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or New York City Metropolitan Area: $187,000 - $240,000**



• 
  

  Zone 2: Boston, DC , Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Seattle: $168,200 - $220,000**



• 
  

  Zone 3: All other US locations: $158,900 - $210,000**

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 [email protected] .

Learn more about the interview process & what it’s like to work with LaunchDarkly's Product Delivery team !

Do you need a disability accommodation?

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