About the Job:
LaunchDarkly is hiring a Staff Frontend Engineer to own the quality and consistency of our core flag surfaces: the flag list, flag targeting, segments, and contexts. These are the pages our customers live in. They grew up across several teams over several years, and bringing them into one coherent experience is the work. Consistency is the mandate here. You will look across every team's work on these surfaces and you will need to be comfortable telling a team that what they are building already exists, or should not be built the way they are building it, and then making the better path easy enough that they take it. That standing comes from technical depth rather than authority you are given.
You will work from the product backwards, and knowing who you are building for is most of the skill:
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The platform engineer standardizing flag hygiene across two hundred services.
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The product manager checking what is live before a customer call.
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The release manager running a staged rollout under change control.
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The support engineer tracing why a customer saw a variation last Tuesday.
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The developer who delegates flag work to an agent, then reviews it.
These people need different things from the same screens, and you will know their workflows well enough to tell which friction is worth fixing. Your levers are the shared frontend foundations underneath those surfaces: our design system, the interaction primitives whole classes of workflow depend on, and the platform capability we can pull in from upstream. When new capability lands in our component library, you are the person who knows the product well enough to say what it unlocks, which customer complaint it closes, and what it takes to get it into the product.
That last persona is where the role turns forward-looking. An agent makes a change, then a person arrives to verify it and decide whether to trust it. They need it explained, with the blast radius legible before it lands. You will prototype those patterns and build the good ones into the foundations. Design and product are your closest partners in that, alongside the Enterprise and Foundation Feature Management teams who build on what you own.
Responsibilities:
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Own the consistency and quality of the core flag surfaces across teams. Set the direction for how shared interactions work, review what teams build on these surfaces, and be accountable for whether the experience hangs together.
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Set the agenda from customer evidence. Know the personas who operate these surfaces and what each is trying to finish, work from support, sales, and usage signal rather than from taste, and turn that into a prioritized plan other people find convincing.
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Own LaunchPad, our design system, as a lever on the product rather than a destination. Components, tokens, and the pattern layer above them, plus the part that matters: adoption, migration of call sites, lint enforcement, and a measurable adoption baseline.
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Track library and platform capability upstream and translate it into product improvement you then drive. Targeting at enterprise scale is a good example, where the interaction patterns available to us now are well ahead of what the product uses. Finding and closing that kind of gap repeatedly is the core loop of this job.
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Build the interaction primitives whole classes of workflow depend on: tables, filtering, sorting, comparison, and bulk change as shared capabilities rather than many divergent implementations. Then migrate the product onto them.
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Prototype and land the interaction patterns for hybrid human and agent workflows: how a change an agent made is explained, reviewed, and trusted in the product. Build them into shared foundations so teams inherit them.
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Be the first line of defense on frontend performance for our highest-traffic surfaces, where the bar is set by our largest customers' scale.
Qualifications:
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10+ years of software engineering experience with deep frontend expertise, including a surface or system you owned across multiple teams you did not manage.
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Strong with TypeScript and React. Our stack is TypeScript and React on the frontend and Go on the backend, and you should be able to work across the API boundary rather than stop at it.
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Experience owning a design system that was genuinely adopted. We will ask about migration, enforcement, and what you did when teams did not adopt it, and we care about those answers more than the component library itself.
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Product and UX judgment on top of engineering depth. You start from who the user is and what they are trying to finish, you can trace a workflow end to end across a product, and you can tell real friction apart from your own preferences. You hold that view in a room with designers and PMs as a peer.
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A track record of cross-team influence without authority. Point to a standard you set, the coalition you built to get it adopted, and what actually changed in the product.
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Judgment about leverage. The defining skill here is picking the few things that unlock the most, out of a backlog that will always be larger than one person.
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Real experience with data-dense enterprise product UI: large collections, filtering, permissions, environments, bulk operations, and the performance work that comes with them at customer scale.
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A point of view on agents in developer tooling. You have built with LLM tool use, MCP, or agent frameworks in production and have an argument about how agent-driven use changes product design rather than just adding a chat box.
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Excellent written communication. Most of your influence will travel as documents, prototypes, and code review.
Pay:
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level 5:
- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $214,800 - $295,350*
- Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $193,400 - $265,870**
- Zone 3: All other US locations - $182,600 - $251,020**
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.
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