Senior Backend Engineer, Data Platform

ABOUT THE ROLE LaunchDarkly's Data Platform empowers teams to deliver and control software safely. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will help build and operate the distributed data infrastructure that moves, stores, and serves large volumes of product data across LaunchDarkly. Our systems support customer-facing product capabilities across Experimentation, Metrics, Release Guardian, Observability, Agent Control, and other areas that depend on reliable data. You will work on streaming and batch processing systems, analytical data stores, warehouse export infrastructure, and the operational foundations needed to keep these systems reliable at scale. WHAT YOU'LL DO As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will design, build, and operate distributed, data-intensive backend systems that power Data Platform capabilities. You will own and improve production data infrastructure, including streaming and batch pipelines, analytical data stores, warehouse export systems, observability, alerting, reliability, and performance. You will also debug and resolve complex production issues across data pipelines, databases, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems, including participating in the team's on-call rotation. Additionally, you will partner with product managers, frontend engineers, UX designers, and other product engineering teams to deliver reliable customer-facing data capabilities. You will write and review technical proposals, contribute to architecture decisions, and help the team make thoughtful trade-offs around scalability, reliability, cost, and operability. Furthermore, you will improve engineering standards, testing practices, deployment safety, observability, tooling, and operational processes for Data Platform systems. You will write maintainable, well-tested code and actively participate in code reviews, design reviews, and production readiness discussions. WHAT YOU'LL NEED To be successful in this role, you will need 6+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, including significant experience with infrastructure, data platform, distributed systems, or data-intensive production systems. You will also need experience designing, building, operating, and debugging reliable production systems that move, store, process, or query large volumes of data. You should have hands-on experience with data pipeline, streaming, orchestration, or batch-processing technologies such as Kinesis, Airflow, Spark, Lambda, Flink, Athena, Kafka, or equivalent systems. Additionally, you should have experience working with analytical, event, warehouse, or operational data stores such as ClickHouse, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Timestream, Glue/Iceberg/S3, Redshift, Databricks, or equivalent systems. You should also have strong programming experience in Go, Python, SQL, Scala, or similar backend languages. Familiarity with distributed systems and backend engineering fundamentals such as concurrency, data modeling, failure handling, retries, idempotency, partitioning, backpressure, and high-throughput processing is also required. Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or equivalent, and observability tools such as Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent is a plus. A strong ownership mindset for production systems, including maintainability, testing, operational excellence, code quality, collaboration, and clear technical communication is essential. WHY REMOTE As a remote employee, you will have the flexibility to work from anywhere and enjoy a work-life balance that suits