Staff Engineer, Experimentation at LaunchDarkly
- Remote.
About the Job: As a Staff Engineer on LaunchDarkly's Experimentation team, you'll build the platform that helps engineering teams make data-driven decisions with confidence. Our Experimentation product enables customers to run A/B tests, measure the impact of feature changes, and optimize experiences — integrated with a feature management platform that processes trillions of evaluations daily. This role sits at the intersection of data science and platform engineering. You'll design the statistical engine, warehouse-native analysis pipelines, and adaptive experimentation systems (including contextual bandits) that power our customers' most important decisions. We want someone who brings genuine depth in applied statistics and ML — as fluent in statistical validity as in system architecture. You'll also architect warehouse-agnostic features that run analysis directly inside customers' data warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery) — modular computation layers that abstract across warehouse environments while maintaining statistical correctness. Deep technical experience, a scientific mindset, and the ability to influence product and technical direction are critical. You'll lead by example: setting the bar for rigor, mentoring teammates, and owning systems end to end, including on-call. Responsibilities: Build the experimentation statistical engine — hypothesis testing, sequential analysis, variance reduction (CUPED, Winsorization), power analysis. Ensure statistical correctness across all experiment types. Design warehouse-native experimentation that runs analysis inside customer warehouses (Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery). Build modular, warehouse-agnostic abstractions for rapid new backend support. Lead adaptive experimentation — contextual bandit systems, Bayesian optimization, automated allocation beyond simple A/B tests. Drive the platform roadmap with product, design, and data science. Shape what we build, not just how. Collaborate cross-functionally with Warehouse Integrations, SDK, Platform, and Data Science teams. Mentor engineers and raise the team's bar for statistical rigor and system design. Own operational excellence — monitoring, observability, incident response, on-call. Robust telemetry and alerting. Qualifications: 10+ years building large-scale experimentation platforms, statistical analysis systems, or data-intensive backend services. Applied-statistics knowledge: hypothesis testing, sequential analysis, variance reduction (CUPED), power analysis, experiment design. Comfortable with frequentist vs. Bayesian trade-offs. Experience with adaptive experimentation ML — contextual bandits, Thompson sampling, Bayesian optimization, or RL-based allocation. Track record designing warehouse-agnostic systems across Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, BigQuery, or similar. Expertise in Go, Python, or similar for backend services and statistical computation. Experience with event-driven architectures, data pipelines, and large-scale data processing. Cloud environments (AWS, GCP) with infrastructure-as-code. Technical leadership: setting direction, breaking down complex problems, influencing across teams. Ability to translate statistical concepts for product and engineering audiences. 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 - $251,0202** 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. …