Engineering Director, 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**

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.