Engineering Manager, Data Platform

About the Job:

We are seeking an Engineering Manager to lead LaunchDarkly ’s Data Platform team and help shape the high-throughput data backbone behind our most important products. As Engineering Manager, you’ll lead a technically deep team building and operating the systems that ingest, process, and serve the real-time and batch data powering Experimentation, Metrics, Observability, Release Guardian, AgentControl, and Data Export.

Working primarily in Go and Python, your team tackles ambitious distributed-systems challenges with technologies including Kinesis, Airflow, Athena, and Iceberg on S3, ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Terraform, AWS, and Datadog. From evolving real-time analytics and context data to strengthening streaming and batch pipelines, you’ll guide the platform that turns vast volumes of events into reliable, customer-facing product experiences while partnering across Core Engineering and product teams to make data faster, more resilient, and more useful for every LaunchDarkly customer.
Responsibilities:

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Lead and develop a team of backend engineers, providing coaching, feedback, and career growth opportunities

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Own the delivery, correctness, and resilience of Data Platform's production systems, including Tier 0 ingestion endpoints and the pipelines and data stores behind them

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Partner with Product Management and consuming engineering teams to scope, estimate, and sequence roadmap work, making tradeoffs in real time

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Act as the primary communicator and point of contact for Data Platform with engineering leadership, partner teams, and customers

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Drive operational excellence: reliability, observability, cost, incident response, and on-call health

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Build team working norms that promote collaboration, reduce silos and bus factor, and keep engineers engaged

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Participate in hiring to grow the team and raise the engineering bar

Qualifications:

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8+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 2 years managing a team of backend or infrastructure engineers

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Experience owning high-throughput, reliability-critical production systems such as event ingestion, streaming or batch pipelines, or large analytical data stores

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Strong distributed-systems fundamentals and the judgment to guide technical tradeoffs with senior engineers

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Proven ability to partner with Product Management to translate business goals into engineering plans with reliable estimates

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Track record of coaching and developing engineers, including performance management, career growth planning, and technical mentorship

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Strong communication skills in a distributed, cross-time-zone environment

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Familiarity with observability practices (metrics, tracing, alerting, structured logging) and comfort leading production incident response

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Experience with Go or Python, and with technologies such as Kafka or Kinesis, ClickHouse, Airflow, Athena or Iceberg, Elasticsearch, and Terraform is a plus

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 2:

- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $191,800 - $263,670**

- Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $172,600 - $237,270**

- Zone 3: All other US locations - $163,000 - $224,070**

- All Zones Inclusive of a 10% Bonus Target

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.

*Within the United States, our geographic pay zones are defined by counties surrounding major metropolitan areas.
**Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.

About LaunchDarkly :

Modern software delivery was supposed to be the foundation for a thriving digital business but reality has proven otherwise. Slow, inefficient devel