Staff Engineer, Experimentation

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