Staff Engineer - Distributed Systems - Flag Delivery

Role Description

As a Staff Distributed Systems Engineer on LaunchDarkly’s Flag Delivery Network (FDN) team, you’ll play a critical role in shaping one of the most high-performance, globally distributed systems powering modern software delivery. The FDN is responsible for delivering real-time feature flag updates to tens of millions of connected SDKs across web, mobile, and server environments—at a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of updates per second. This infrastructure is a mission-critical part of our platform, and your work will directly impact the performance, reliability, and safety of software rollouts for some of the world’s most innovative engineering teams.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives on building low-latency, high-availability systems at scale. You’ll architect and evolve the systems behind our global edge delivery infrastructure, collaborate with SDK and platform teams, and lead initiatives that push the boundaries of what’s possible in edge computing and real-time data propagation.

You’ll be expected to lead by example—driving operational excellence, mentoring teammates, and owning systems throughout their lifecycle, including being part of the on-call rotation. This is a staff-level role where deep technical experience, a systems-thinking mindset, and a bias for action are critical.

If you’re passionate about distributed systems, excited by global-scale engineering challenges, and motivated by a strong sense of ownership, this is the job for you.

Responsibilities

• Architect, design, and build resilient and scalable systems for delivering feature flag data globally, optimized for high availability and low latency — single-digit milliseconds within regions.
• Own and evolve core components such as our global edge delivery network, streaming infrastructure, and data synchronization protocols.
• Drive improvements in system availability, performance, and operational excellence by identifying bottlenecks and designing for failure.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with infrastructure, SDK, product, and security teams to deliver seamless and secure customer experiences.
• Mentor and lead other engineers by modeling best practices in distributed systems development, code quality, and systems thinking.
• Take initiative in incident response and post-incident reviews, continually improving system reliability and observability.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for the services you help build, and demonstrate a strong sense of ownership and accountability for their uptime and reliability.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in architecting, building, and operating complex, large-scale backend and infrastructure services, with a multi-year, hands-on focus specifically on distributed systems. This level of expertise is typically found in engineers with 10+ years of relevant industry experience.
• Deep understanding of event-driven architectures, streaming protocols (e.g., Server-Sent Events, WebSockets), and stateful connection management at scale.
• Expertise in Go, Java, Rust or similar systems programming languages. (We use Go and a little bit of Rust.)
• Familiarity with real-time data pipelines, load balancing, and global edge networks/CDNs.
• Proven experience in monitoring, observability, and operational excellence — designing systems with robust telemetry and actionable alerting to meet SLOs for low latency and high availability.
• Experience operating systems in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP) using infrastructure-as-code tools.
• Experience working with distributed data stores and caching systems (e.g., Redis, DynamoDB, Kafka, Varnish and similar).
• Proven history of technical leadership: setting direction, breaking down complex problems, and influencing outcomes across teams.

Pay

• Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones for Level 5:
• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $214,800 - $295,350
• Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $193,400 - $265,870
• Zone 3: All other US locations - $182,600 - $251,020
• 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.