Product Delivery Team at LaunchDarkly

We hired over 130 people in 2022, ending the year at 500+ employees.

While scale is important, we also place a high emphasis on a great candidate experience and are transparent about what you can expect throughout our process.

At LaunchDarkly, our goal is to change the way every software engineering team deploys their code. We are assembling an unstoppable team of talented people and that begins with a great candidate experience. The first call is with our Talent team, followed by a brief conversation with one of our engineering leaders (or product or design leaders, respectively). Our goal is to learn more about you, your interests, and your skills. And we want to give you the opportunity to discover if LaunchDarkly is right for you.

If you are an engineer applying for an individual contributor role, the next step is a short coding project. This helps us understand how you approach problems as a developer. And it allows you to see the types of challenges our engineers work on day to day. The project you complete will serve as the basis for later steps in the interview.

We then proceed to a virtual onsite interview consisting of:

1. Two verbal technical interviews, covering your background and a system design challenge.
2. A review and extension of your coding project, in which an engineer will review your challenge with you and discuss your implementation. Then you’ll be asked to extend your solution to take on some new requirements.
3. A Values interview, in which we discuss our company and our team values and the values that are important to you in your work.

We’ve built our interviewing process to assess candidates holistically. Once we decide to make an offer, we match the candidate to the team (or squad, as we like to call them) that best matches their interests and the team’s needs. Squads are typically six to eight engineers and each squad works closely with a product manager, product designer, and engineering manager to achieve a distinct mission. We always make sure each of our squads have a mix of senior and junior talent and encourage movement to different squads so engineers can be exposed to different projects and technologies.

You’ll work closely with folks from every other department. We look for people who will thrive working as part of a collaborative, high-performing team. We feel strongly that teams do it better.

We’re software engineers building products for software teams.

One of the things we love about working at LaunchDarkly is that we are making life better for software teams around the globe. Our “Product Delivery” Team is made up of engineers, product managers, and designers. We have four Product Delivery values:

1. Always Be Flagging – be exemplary users of Feature Management to ship faster with less risk.
2. Think Incrementally – embrace the cumulative impact of small changes.
3. Simple, Correct, and Fast – to achieve big things efficiently, design for simplicity first.
4. Invest in the Team – be generous with your time, because we succeed or fail as a team.

We approach hard problems with an engineering mindset. And we're not afraid of big challenges.

Our engineering team is composed of veterans from the top technology companies in the industry. We built our system right the first time and it has scaled for years as a result. We have been able to meet the challenges that exponential growth of our product has brought with it, and much of this has rested on our foundational decisions.

We invested heavily in a modern, distributed flag delivery network – even when the company was small. We handle our infrastructure as code. We build and deploy on AWS and have made extensive use of platform capabilities (AWS Lambda, Kinesis). We want our team to focus on high-value problems and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting to others.

All of our core services are written in Go, which strikes a great balance between performance and ease of development. All of this gives our customers the ability to control their software in product and make critical changes in situations when milliseconds matter. We work every day to give engineering teams just like ours new super-powers.

LaunchDarkly is doing bold new things to ensure our employees are engaged.

More than half of our first 20 employees, like Alexis Georges, are still with us. Our commitment to living our values not only makes us stronger as a company, but it also makes LaunchDarkly a place where people genuinely love working. Here’s what a few of our teammates have to say:

“My favorite company value is 'build together, win together.' The way in which everyone supports each other, whether for a work project or because they need to take time off, makes it a safe place to be open about what you need and when you need help. It’s great to watch people step up and offer help or to cover for people." – Cameron Savage, a Product Manager who has worked at LaunchDarkly since 2019. This culture of care is also demonstrative of our company value: "work impactfully, work sustainably."

"There are many opportunities to try new things based on what you’re interested in, demonstrating our value ‘learn and grow.’ My managers have been flexible in giving me the opportunities I’ve asked for to learn or try something new, allow space to make and learn from mistakes, and are open to internal mobility and joining different teams. I was impressed by what I learned during the interview process about working at LaunchDarkly, and I’ve found that my experience has lived up to my expectations!” – Shia Liu, a Software Engineer who started in April of 2022.

When the pandemic first arrived, we adapted quickly, transitioning to a remote-first company and creating new best practices to support team members during this difficult time. We added benefits such as a home-office stipend, and changed how we worked together to ensure that everyone had the resources they needed to get their jobs done effectively. We continue to invest in collaborating closely, even though we are physically distant. For instance, the Galaxia Latinx ERG (Employee Resource Group), whose gatherings are open to anyone like all of our employee resource groups, hosted a fun empanada making class for Latinx/Hispanic heritage month where several dozen employees across the company were sent the ingredients to their homes and followed a live class hosted by a professional chef. At the end, people posted photos of their end-products on Slack and celebrated their shared experience.

It has paid off. Our business and team continues to grow. We hired over 40 new Product Delivery teammates in 2022 and are still expanding. You can learn more about our high-performing team here.

We create an inclusive space for everyone.

Respect and integrity are at the core of how we hire, how we work together as a team, how we treat our customers, and how we engage with our greater communities. This means we always seek to "widen the circle" and look for a variety of perspectives to get things done. We believe in teams and the best teams are built on the diverse experiences and skills of a rich mix of people. Great individuals make even greater teams, and we celebrate our wide range of backgrounds and stages of life.

Here are just a few great examples of teammates who changed career paths before joining LaunchDarkly's Product Delivery department:

• Zoë Adelman (Product Management Lead) went through a full-stack coding bootcamp to work as a web developer, then moved into product design and built a company’s first design system. Next, she worked for a design collaboration product in both post-sales and product.
• Linnea Schulenburg (Sr. Product Manager) started out teaching English overseas, then taught art and design, worked in marketing at a school, then got a side gig at a startup before moving full-time into the tech world. She found the customer education she did in marketing was transferrable to product management.
• Ember Stevens (Technical Writer) started out in higher education. “I realized that creating written training materials was one of my favorite parts of the job, and was thrilled to find out you could make a full-time career out of that kind of work. Eventually I was able to leverage my experience as a long-time customer of a local software company into working for them, and my tech writing career started there. Now, I love what I do and haven’t looked back!”

Enterprise startups like LaunchDarkly need to be built for the long run, and we are building a team that can be healthy and effective for years to come.

That means setting healthy boundaries for work, and ensuring that we all put family and health first. We support people through life transitions and ensure that we balance work and family.

We offer a tremendous amount of flexibility on our teams. We became a remote first company and worked to ensure that you can do your best work from anywhere. Team members have an enormous amount of autonomy with their time. We generally work on Pacific Time, but as long as you are accomplishing your goals and collaborating well with your team, no one will be checking your clock but you.

Meetings happen. At LaunchDarkly, we try to make sure they don’t happen too often. We also strike a balance between collaborating and making individual progress. We understand that people need uninterrupted blocks of time to create their best work.

We also support an unlimited vacation policy – and we strongly encourage you to use it. We want everyone to take the time they need to stay healthy for the long run. Burnout is real and we actively work to avoid that here. Our co-founder and former CEO, Edith Harbaugh, (who was recognized as one of just eight female CEOs in the Forbes Cloud 100 list for 2022) experienced burnout firsthand and is passionate about making time for hobbies. After growing the business to $100M ARR and reaching over 4,000 customers, she passed the baton to Dan Rogers to lead as CEO as we continue to scale.

LaunchDarkly is an ideal place to grow as a person, as a contributor, and as a leader. You can do the best work of your career here.

LaunchDarkly is a place where everyone can learn and grow. We're dedicated to the professional and personal growth of all our team members. We are growing rapidly, and with growth comes new opportunities. We have a track record of balancing our team by growing new leaders internally as well as bringing in fresh ideas from the outside. Every team needs both. We encourage teammates to move around, try new challenges, and learn new skills. We even make it possible to switch departments and careers for people who are passionate about trying something new.

We're proud to have a robust internship program. In the summer of 2021, we had three conversions to FTE (full-time employee), four returning interns, and a total of 10 interns. In 2022, we had one conversion to FTE and a total of 13 interns. In 2023, we’re excited to have two more interns return.

We also offer every team member a $1,000 annual educational stipend. People use it to attend seminars, workshops, and conferences, to take classes, and to purchase books or other learning materials.

Last but not least, we partnered with LifeLabs to offer workshops to all employees across the organization. Some of our most recent workshops have centered around coaching, feedback, inclusive interviewing, and productivity.

Every engineer at LaunchDarkly has personally felt the pain of shipping and breaking something in production. We’re here to help.

Feature management is critically important to every software company, and every company that is in the process of becoming a software company. We proudly serve customers like Square, Atlassian, Intuit, IBM, and NBC (to name a few), and know how valuable it is to have a safety net when releasing new changes of all types. Rapid, easy, risk-free deployment is transformative for software teams. We love being able to empower development teams to collaborate more effectively, maintain stability, and deliver software faster.

We serve trillions of feature flags daily for companies big and small. Developers and operations teams use LaunchDarkly to eliminate risk from their software development cycles, and we (of course) use our own product to uneventfully ship code many times a day.

We won’t stop until every software team on the planet is using feature management to deploy with confidence.

We are proud to be based in Oakland and be a part of the community here.

The business landscape in Oakland is much smaller than it is in San Francisco and in the rest of Silicon Valley, and we like being a part of it. Oakland as a city is community-driven and grassroots. We embrace the diversity that exists in Oakland. We aim to leave our mark on the city through mentorship, creating jobs, and donations to local grassroots organizations.

We partner with Code Nation for annual summer internship programs. Code Nation equips students in under-resourced schools with the fundamental coding skills and professional experiences that together create access to careers in technology. We highly recommend other companies participate!

We empower our employees to come up with creative opportunities for diversity initiatives and community events to promote growth and education for all individuals by making resources available and inviting the community to participate. We offer gift matching, and encourage employees to use time to contribute to the non-profits they feel most passionately about.

LaunchDarkly also joined Pledge 1%, a global movement to create a new normal for companies of all sizes and stages to have a positive social impact through their business. We are pledging 1% of revenue to charitable causes and have partnered with local Oakland nonprofits that address homelessness and poverty.

Visit the website of our social impact program LaunchDarkly.org to find out how we’re making meaningful contributions to some of our world’s most pressing social issues. And if any of the above sparks your curiosity, don’t hesitate to check out our open roles and get in touch!