Director of Engineering, Core

About the Job:

As Director of Engineering, you'll lead the teams behind LaunchDarkly's core platform — the infrastructure our customers depend on every time they ship. You'll set technical direction across multiple engineering teams, grow a bench of strong managers and senior engineers, and make sure the systems in our critical path stay fast, reliable, and ready to scale.

We'd prefer this person to be based in the US, any time zone.

Responsibilities:

• Technical strategy: Set a clear, credible technical roadmap for your teams and communicate it up, down, and across the org.

• Team leadership: Manage and grow a group of engineering managers and senior engineers. Hire, coach, and retain strong technical talent.

• Cross-team execution: Drive complex, multi-team initiatives from design through delivery, including large migrations and infrastructure evolution.

• Operational excellence: Own reliability and performance for systems in the critical path for customers, with real rigor around on-call, incident response, and observability.

• Cross-functional partnership: Work closely with product, design, and other engineering leaders to align technical direction with business priorities.

• Modern engineering practice: Bring emerging tools and AI-assisted development into your team's day-to-day to increase leverage.

• Culture carrier: Build a high-trust, high-agency engineering culture, and act as a mentor and multiplier across the org.

About You:

• Experienced engineering leader: You've managed engineering managers and multiple teams, with a track record of growing technical leaders under you.

• Deep technical background: Real hands-on experience as a software engineer, with exposure to distributed systems, high-scale infrastructure, or developer tools.

• Comfortable with ambiguity: You set direction in a fast-changing environment and adjust as priorities shift.

• Strong communicator: You translate technical tradeoffs into terms product, business, and executive stakeholders can act on.

• Ships: You have a bias toward action and a track record of delivering complex technical projects end to end.

Qualifications:

• Team leadership: Experience managing engineering managers or multiple teams.

• Technical depth: Significant hands-on experience with distributed systems, high-scale infrastructure, or developer tooling.

• Project leadership: Track record owning a major technical migration or infrastructure initiative end to end.

• Cloud & systems: Comfortable operating across cloud infrastructure and production distributed systems.

• Hiring & development: Strong track record hiring and developing engineering talent.

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level M4:

• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or New York City Metropolitan Area: $269,400 - $370,480**

• Zone 2: Boston, DC, Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Seattle: $242,500 - $333,410 **

• Zone 3: All other US locations: $229,000 - $314,930**

• Inclusive of 15% 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 development cycles, costly outages, and fragmented customer experiences are preventing developers from building their best software. The LaunchDarkly platform helps developers innovate on new features faster while protecting them with a safety valve to instantly rewind when things go wrong. Developers can target product experiences to any customer segment and maximize the business impact of every feature. And by gradually rolling out new application components, they escape nightmare "big-bang" technology migrations. 

The LaunchDarkly platform was built to guide engineers to the next frontier of DevOps by:

• Improving the velocity and stability of software releases, without the fear of end customer outages
• Delivering targeted experiences by easily personalizing features to customer cohorts
• Maximizing the business impact of every feature through the ability to experiment and optimize
• Coordinating the release and optimization of software to provide consistent experiences across mobile platforms and device types
• Improving the effectiveness and productivity of engineering teams, by providing insights into engineering cadence and stability

At LaunchDarkly, we believe in the power of teams. We're building a team that is humble, open, collaborative, respectful and kind. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. LD invites any applicant to review our written Affirmative Action Plan. To do so, contact People Ops at [email protected]. 

Do you need a disability accommodation?

Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance. 

Your safety matters to us. To protect yourself from potential scams, LaunchDarkly recruiters will only contact you from @launchdarkly.com email addresses or via LinkedIn from "Verified Recruiter" accounts. Be cautious of emails from other domains.  Legitimate LaunchDarkly recruiters will never ask for money, fees, or banking information before making a job offer. LaunchDarkly will never make a job offer without conducting a formal interview process. Our interview process does not involve asking detailed questions by email. If you are ever unsure about a communication that you receive, don't click any links—visit Careers | LaunchDarkly  directly for confirmed job openings and links to apply.

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