Job Description
About the Job:
The Foundation team’s mission is to make LaunchDarkly the tool that every new startup and small engineering team wants to use. That means owning the moments that determine whether a developer evaluating LaunchDarkly becomes a customer: the trial experience, the SDK integration path, the first time they see a feature flag work in their own code, and the point where they understand what they’re actually paying for.
Developers are a demanding audience. They don’t tolerate setup friction, opaque pricing, or products that require a sales call to understand. The activation and trial experience for a developer tool has to earn attention quickly and deliver real value before asking for commitment. Designing that well across the signup flow, SDK integration, in-product onboarding, and first engagement with advanced valuable features like experiments and guarded releases is the core design challenge here.
The team works from a documented evidence base: customer feedback analysis, funnel data, and recorded sales calls. The problems on the roadmap are grounded in that evidence, each with a defined hypothesis and a target metric. There’s also a newer design problem: the team believes AI agents will become a primary developer onboarding channel, and building that experience is active roadmap work. It is an incredibly exciting place for a designer to play.
This role calls for someone with a growth background (activation funnels, conversion experiments, behavioral design), not a generalist product design scope.
Responsibilities:
Design the Foundation trial and activation experience from signup through SDK integration, first flag, first advanced feature, and conversion to a paid plan.
Work from the team’s evidence base — customer insights data, product analytics funnel analysis, sales and support call patterns — and add to it with your own research. Run experiments against that evidence on cycle times measured in weeks.
When you find drop-offs, trace them to their structural cause: wrong information architecture, missing context, an illegible value proposition. The fix belongs upstream, not just at the symptom.
Design the agentic onboarding experience: what getting started with LaunchDarkly looks like when the interface is an MCP, a Skill and an AI coding agent rather than a browser. The team has a working thesis and active PRDs; the UX is open and exciting.
Improve advanced feature discoverability. Experiments and guarded releases are significantly underused relative to their value, and closing that gap requires working across team boundaries.
Contribute to roadmap decisions alongside your product manager and engineering manager peers, bringing activation opportunities forward with data rather than waiting to be briefed.
Participate in UX critique and expect direct, specific feedback in both directions.
Qualifications:
Experience
7+ years designing digital products, with examples of impact on activation, conversion, or retention. A strong portfolio shows what metric moved and why the design decision caused it.
Growth design experience in B2B software (PLG, freemium, self-serve, or trial-to-paid) in a developer or technical product context.
Experimentation and data
You’ve run design experiments end-to-end: written the hypothesis, shipped the leader, read the results. You can tell when an outcome is meaningful and when the test needs to run longer or be redesigned.
You work directly with funnel data, activation metrics, and voice-of-customer analysis. You’ve made decisions that the data supported, and decisions it contradicted.
You define what success looks like before you start, and you’re honest when results don’t support the hypothesis. You can articulate the tradeoff between a short-term activation win and longer-term product coherence, and you prioritize the work that will actually move the business forward.
Design craft
You trace activation failures to their upstream cause and design solutions that hold across the funnel rather than patching individual screens or components.
You work across flows, high-fidelity specs, prototypes, and written strategy, and choose the format based on what the decision requires.
You’re comfortable doing 0→1 exploration on an ambiguous and emerging problem (agentic onboarding) and iterating rapidly on an existing, instrumented flow.
Developer context
You’ve designed the part of the developer experience where someone is evaluating, integrating, and setting up a new tool. CLI usage, SDK setup, API credential management, connection debugging are familiar territory.
You ask engineering questions, read the docs, and understand what’s actually hard to build.
Familiarity with AI agent interfaces (MCP integrations, Cursor/Copilot/Claude workflows, or similar) is important given the agentic onboarding work on the roadmap. Deep prior experience here isn’t expected as this is an emerging space but high curiosity and strong opinions about the design problems and how to solve are.
Communication
You state positions and back them with evidence. You drive discovery in a triad and shape the work before anyone hands you a brief.
You present to design and product leadership with directness. Feedback in both directions is specific, not hedged.
Pay:
Target pay ranges based on Geographic Zones* for Level P4:
- Zone 1: San Francisco/Bay Area or NYC Metropolitan Area, Boston, Seattle - $171,200 - $235,400*
- Zone 2: Irvine, LA, Monterey, Santa Barbara, Santa Rosa, Austin, Portland, Philadelphia, Chicago - $ 154,100 - $211,860**
- Zone 3: All other US locations - $145,500 - $200,090**
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.
Do you need a disability accommodation?
Fill out this accommodations request form and someone from our People Operations team will contact you for assistance.
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