📋 Job Overview
We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead LaunchDarkly’s Cloud Engineering team, the team responsible for the foundational infrastructure our products and engineering teams depend on.
🏢 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 Role
Cloud Engineering owns LaunchDarkly’s AWS accounts and networking, multi-region Kubernetes infrastructure, Terraform and GitOps workflows, CockroachDB operations, disaster-recovery capabilities, and FedRAMP infrastructure posture. The team is small, senior, and recently rebuilt. This is a frontline leadership role for a manager who treats operational health as a top priority, leads calmly through incidents, and creates leverage through software, automation, and reliable paved paths.
✅ Key Responsibilities
- Lead and develop a senior Cloud Engineering team, providing clear expectations, coaching, feedback, performance management, and career-development support.
- Own the operational health of LaunchDarkly’s cloud infrastructure, including incident response, on-call health, service-level objectives, resilience, and disaster recovery.
- Launch and deliver a multi-quarter infrastructure insourcing program, including sequencing work, managing dependencies, communicating milestones, and ensuring a successful transition.
- Guide technical priorities and tradeoffs across AWS infrastructure, networking, multi-region Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, GitOps, datastore operations, and compliance-related infrastructure.
- Build leverage through software, automation, and paved paths that help product engineering teams use infrastructure safely and independently.
- Support migrations by providing guidance, patterns, and enablement while maintaining clear ownership boundaries with partner teams.
- Establish team norms for effective AI-assisted engineering and identify opportunities to reduce operational toil through AI and automation.
- Maintain team health and continuity through change, fostering an inclusive, collaborative, and accountable environment.
- Partner with Service Frameworks, Core Platform, Revenue Platform, Data Platform, and product engineering teams on shared infrastructure priorities and cross-team dependencies.
- Communicate roadmaps, operational risks, investment needs, and progress clearly to engineering leadership and cross-functional stakeholders.
- Participate in hiring and team planning as the organization grows.
📌 Required Qualifications
- 2+ years of experience managing an infrastructure, platform engineering, or site reliability engineering team at a product company, including people management of an on-call team.
- Demonstrated ownership of incident response, on-call health, and service-level objective frameworks for critical production systems.
- Experience leading at least one multi-quarter infrastructure migration or insourcing program from planning through completion.
- Technical fluency with AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code practices, with the judgment to guide discussions and tradeoffs with senior engineers.
- Experience taking over an established team and maintaining engagement, performance, and retention through a leadership transition.
- A clear point of view on team norms and practices for AI-assisted engineering.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical and operational priorities to a range of audiences.
- A thoughtful, calm, and accountable leadership approach, particularly during incidents and periods of change.
⭐ Desirable Experience
- Experience with vendor negotiations or cloud cost management.
- Experience supporting FedRAMP or other compliance-related infrastructure and operations.
- Experience operating large-scale datastores or OLAP systems.
- Experience growing a team through funded expansion.
🎁 Benefits
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level M2:
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**
All Zones Inclusive of a 10% Bonus Target
Restricted Stock Units (RSUs), health, vision, and dental insurance, and mental health benefits in addition to salary.
🛂 Visa & Eligibility
LaunchDarkly is 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.
