Senior Backend Engineer

Software powers the world, and LaunchDarkly empowers teams to deliver and control it safely. As a Senior Backend Engineer on the Identity & Access Management team, you will own the systems every customer touches before they touch anything else: SAML and OAuth2 single sign-on, SCIM user and team provisioning, login and session management, multi-factor authentication, and the API key and token infrastructure that authenticates every request to our platform. When authentication is wrong, customers cannot get in at all — or the wrong person gets in. Security and availability here are commitments to our customers, not nice-to-haves.

You and your team will make this stack operable and enterprise-ready. Technologies include Go, TypeScript, CockroachDB, Redis, AWS, and Terraform. Exact tool match matters far less than deep backend judgment and a track record of safely changing systems that are not allowed to be wrong.

Responsibilities:

• Own LaunchDarkly’s authentication surface end to end — single sign-on, SCIM provisioning, login and session flows, multi-factor authentication, and API key and token authentication.

• Build the enterprise identity capabilities our largest customers require: additional identity-provider integrations, support for multiple IdPs per account, and MFA enforcement by default.

• Make the stack operable: SLOs, monitoring for certificate expiry and provisioning failures, actionable alerting, runbooks, and a sustainable on-call.

• Partner with Product Security on threat modeling, audit logging, and compliance requirements including SOC 2 and FedRAMP.

• Set the technical direction for identity at LaunchDarkly, and raise the bar for the engineers around you through design review and mentorship.

Qualifications:

• 6+ years of professional software-engineering experience, with significant work on complex backend applications.

• Experience building or operating production authentication and identity systems.

• A track record on systems where correctness and availability are non-negotiable, and the habits that come with it: backward-compatible change, staged rollouts, and safe cutovers.

• Proficiency in at least one backend language (Go, Rust, Python, etc.) and familiarity with cloud infrastructure (AWS or equivalent), plus strong production ownership including on-call.

Bonus

• Protocol depth in SAML, OIDC/OAuth2, or SCIM, and integration experience with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, OneLogin, or Ping.

• MFA/WebAuthn, RBAC and authorization policy engines, or audit logging at multi-tenant scale.

• Engineering under compliance regimes such as SOC 2 or FedRAMP.

Pay:

Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 5:

• 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**

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. 

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.

Please notify us of any fraudulent representation by sending an email to careers@launchdarkly.com.