Senior Backend Engineer, Data Platform

LaunchDarkly is a company that empowers teams to deliver and control software safely. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Data Platform team, you will build and operate the distributed data infrastructure that supports customer-facing product capabilities, ensuring reliability and performance at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate distributed, data-intensive backend systems that power Data Platform capabilities across Experimentation, Metrics, Release Guardian, Observability, Agent Control, and other product areas
• Own and improve production data infrastructure, including streaming and batch pipelines, analytical data stores, warehouse export systems, observability, alerting, reliability, and performance
• Debug and resolve complex production issues across data pipelines, databases, cloud infrastructure, and distributed systems, including participating in the team's on-call rotation
• Partner with product managers, frontend engineers, UX designers, and other product engineering teams to deliver reliable customer-facing data capabilities
• Write and review technical proposals, contribute to architecture decisions, and help the team make thoughtful trade-offs around scalability, reliability, cost, and operability
• Improve engineering standards, testing practices, deployment safety, observability, tooling, and operational processes for Data Platform systems
• Write maintainable, well-tested code and actively participate in code reviews, design reviews, and production readiness discussions

Requirements:

• 6+ years of professional backend software engineering experience, including significant experience with infrastructure, data platform, distributed systems, or data-intensive production systems
• Experience designing, building, operating, and debugging reliable production systems that move, store, process, or query large volumes of data
• Hands-on experience with data pipeline, streaming, orchestration, or batch-processing technologies such as Kinesis, Airflow, Spark, Lambda, Flink, Athena, Kafka, or equivalent systems
• Experience working with analytical, event, warehouse, or operational data stores such as ClickHouse, Postgres, Elasticsearch, Timestream, Glue/Iceberg/S3, Redshift, Databricks, or equivalent systems
• 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
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform or equivalent, and observability tools such as Datadog, New Relic, or equivalent
• A strong ownership mindset for production systems, including maintainability, testing, operational excellence, code quality, collaboration, and clear technical communication