Backend Engineer, Flag Delivery

ABOUT THE ROLE LaunchDarkly is seeking a skilled Backend Engineer to join our Flag Delivery team. As a critical component of our product, serving data to our customers is a top priority, and we're expanding the team to add bandwidth and energy. This role is ideal for an engineer eager to learn and grow alongside a senior team that balances modernization with resilience and operational improvements. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Backend Engineer on our Flag Delivery team, you'll be responsible for building and improving backend services that power our Flag Delivery systems. You'll work closely with partner teams, including SDK, Platform, SRE, Security, and Enterprise, to deliver improvements across the broader platform. Your tasks will include: - Building, improving, and operating backend services that sit directly on LaunchDarkly's critical delivery path - Contributing to systems that support streaming and polling delivery models for LaunchDarkly SDKs - Debugging production issues, improving service reliability, and maintaining strong standards around latency, availability, observability, and operability - Collaborating with technologies and patterns common to modern distributed backend systems, including caching layers, network services, concurrency, failure handling, and cloud infrastructure - Participating in the on-call rotation and taking ownership of the systems you help build - Learning the existing architecture deeply and making pragmatic improvements that increase system clarity, performance, and maintainability - Using AI as part of your engineering workflow with sound judgment, including knowing when to use it, how to direct it effectively, and how to verify or reject its output - Reasoning clearly about code, architecture, and whole-system behavior even when AI is in the loop WHAT YOU'LL NEED To succeed in this role, you'll need: - 5+ years of backend software engineering experience - Experience building or operating production backend systems - Strong programming skills in Go, Java, Rust, or a similar backend language; today the team primarily uses Go, with some Rust in the broader environment - Clear, existing AI usage in engineering work - Ability to use AI without surrendering technical judgment - Familiarity with distributed systems fundamentals such as caching, concurrency, failure modes, and reliability - Experience debugging production issues and using observability to understand system behavior - Ability to reason clearly about code, architecture, and system behavior - Strong learning orientation and comfort working with senior engineers - Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to work well across engineering teams - Willingness to participate in on-call and production support WHY REMOTE As a remote worker, you'll have the flexibility to work from anywhere while still being part of a high-performing team. LaunchDarkly operates from a place of high trust and transparency, and we're happy to state the pay range for our open roles to best align with your needs. BENEFITS - Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 3: - Zone 1: $171,200 - $235,400** - Zone 2: $154,100 - $211,860** - Zone 3: $145,500 - $200,090** - Restricted Stock Units (RSUs),