About the Job:
LaunchDarkly is the industry leader in Feature Flagging, and our mission is to empower all software teams with advanced functionalities like Experimentation, Guardian Edition and new product offerings through our expertly designed SDKs.
As a Staff Software Engineer on LaunchDarkly's SDK team, you will play a pivotal role as a visionary technical leader, shaping and innovating the SDKs that serve as the backbone of our customers' experiences. With over 20 SDKs spanning diverse technologies, you will ensure they deliver unparalleled performance, resilience, and reliability. This position also involves driving cross-functional initiatives across engineering teams, enabling critical business capabilities that strengthen LaunchDarkly's position as a leader in the development platform market.
Our SDKs are more than just lightweight client libraries; they are feature-rich components optimized for performance, concurrency, and resiliency while adhering to idiomatic best practices for their respective platforms. By joining this team, you will contribute to shaping SDKs that power trillions of feature flags daily, driving meaningful and impactful outcomes for businesses and their users worldwide.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the design, development, and release of LaunchDarkly's JavaScript SDKs (e.g., Node Server, React) other supported platforms
- Optimize and create new processes and procedures to improve and speed up the overall SDK development lifecycle (including build, test and release).
- Shape and innovate the technical direction, provide leadership and contribute to our highest impact open-source JavaScript and non-JavaScript SDKs, ensuring alignment with ecosystem best practices and organizational goals.
- Identify, drive decisions, and implement improvements in architecture, tooling, and processes to enhance SDK performance and maintainability.
- Stay at the forefront of technology trends, leveraging your deep expertise to advocate for and implement innovative, high-impact solutions.
- Lead architectural decisions and collaborate with stakeholders across engineering and product teams to design scalable, innovative SDK features and functionalities that align with LaunchDarkly's long-term technical strategy, addressing complex integration challenges and ensuring seamless solutions for diverse developer use cases.
Qualifications:
- 7+ years of experience (or equivalent) developing high-performance libraries, SDKs, or developer tools in JavaScript, with a focus on delivering production-grade, maintainable code.
- 12+ years of experience delivering production-grade, maintainable code.
- Advanced knowledge of JavaScript, TypeScript, and related ecosystems, with experience in both front-end and back-end frameworks.
- Polyglot background- fluent in JavaScript, TypeScript, and at least one other language, with the ability to context switch between languages quickly.
- Strong foundation in computer science principles, including algorithms, data structures, and software design patterns.
- Excellent written communication skills with the ability to work across teams and advocate for technical solutions.
- Self‐starter and problem solver, willing to solve hard problems and work independently
- 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
Pay:
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level P5:
- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or New York City Metropolitan Area: $200,000 - $235,000**
- Zone 2: Boston, DC, Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Seattle: $180,000 - $212,000**
- Zone 3: All other US locations: $170,000 - $200,000**
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.
Top Skills
What We Do
LaunchDarkly isn’t just a leader in feature management — it’s the first scalable feature management platform. Feature management allows development teams to innovate faster by fundamentally transforming how software is delivered to customers. With the ability to gradually release new software features to any segment of users on any platform, DevOps teams can standardize safe releases at scale, accelerate their journey to the cloud and collaborate more effectively with business teams.
Today, LaunchDarkly deploys peaks of 20 trillion feature flags a day, and that number continues to grow. Founded in 2014 in Oakland, California by Edith Harbaugh and John Kodumal, LaunchDarkly has been named on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, InfoWorld’s 2021 Technology of the Year list, and the Enterprise Tech 30 list.
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.
Why Work With Us
We're Oakland-based but Remote-first and have one of the few women CEOs in our industry.
Top reasons to work at LaunchDarkly:
Great work/life balance and unlimited PTO, Awesome culture and human-centric values, Product is a "Need to have": Category leader in Feature Management, Competitive Pay and Healthcare Benefits, Pre-IPO Stock
Gallery
 (1).png)
