Backend Engineer, AI

About the Job:

The LaunchDarkly AI team is on a mission to extend the value of the LaunchDarkly platform for software teams building AI applications. As a Backend Engineer on the AI team, you will play a pivotal role in designing, building, and maintaining scalable and reliable backend systems to power innovative features that address the unique challenges of AI development and deployment.

This is a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge backend challenges in the rapidly evolving AI space. You will design and implement API methods, develop robust integrations with AI model providers (e.g., OpenAI, Google Cloud AI, AWS Bedrock), and optimize backend systems to handle metrics visualization, monitoring, and progressive rollouts for AI features.

You’ll collaborate closely with the Product and Design teams to help define technical solutions for a 0→1 product and work with early adopters—both external customers and internal teams—to refine and scale the system.

Responsibilities:

• Build and expand our feature management products and APIs, written in Go, with a focus on AI

• Collaborate with frontend engineers to deliver user-facing features

• Monitor and improve server-side performance

• Write unit, integration, and load tests as necessary

• Actively participate in code reviews

• Write and review technical proposals

• Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes

Qualifications:

• Extensive experience with server-side programming languages (e.g. in Java / Scala, Ruby, Python, Go)

• Proficient in designing, implementing, and maintaining RESTful APIs

• Hands-on experience building GenAI features or working with Large Language Models (LLMs), either through direct model integration or leveraging AI APIs like OpenAI, Google Cloud AI, or AWS Bedrock.

• Understanding of prompt engineering, fine-tuning models, or deploying AI services in production environments.

• Familiarity with computer science fundamentals such as data structures, distributed systems, concurrency, and threading

• Comfortable navigating ambiguous challenges in a rapidly evolving domain

• Passionate about learning new technologies and staying at the forefront of AI advancements

• Strong sense of ownership and accountability for delivering impactful solutions

• Proven ability to work closely with Product and Design teams to define requirements for new features in a fast-paced iterative environment.

• You write code that can be easily understood by others, with an eye towards maintainability

• You hold yourself and others to a high bar when working with production systems

• You value high code quality, automated testing, and other engineering best practices

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 4:

• Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area: $173,000 - $204,000

• Zone 2: Boston, DC, Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Seattle: $156,000 - $184,000

• Zone 3: All other US locations: $147,000 - $173,000:

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 hr@launchdarkly.com. 

Learn more about the interview process & what it’s like to work with LaunchDarkly's Product Delivery team!

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