Staff Engineer, Distributed Systems

Summary

Join LaunchDarkly's Flag Delivery Network (FDN) team as a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer and play a critical role in shaping a high-performance, globally distributed system. The FDN delivers real-time feature flag updates to millions of connected SDKs. This is a mission-critical role impacting software rollout performance and reliability for major engineering teams. You will architect and evolve global edge delivery infrastructure, collaborate with various teams, and lead initiatives in edge computing and real-time data propagation. Lead by example, driving operational excellence, mentoring teammates, and owning systems throughout their lifecycle, including on-call rotation. Deep technical experience, systems thinking, and a bias for action are essential. This role is perfect for those passionate about distributed systems and global-scale engineering challenges.

Requirements

• 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

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

Benefits

Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary