Principal Staff Software Engineer - Core Infrastructure

Principal Staff Software Engineer

Company Description LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, built to help members of all backgrounds and experiences achieve more in their careers. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Every day our members use our products to make connections, discover opportunities, build skills and gain insights. We believe amazing things happen when we work together in an environment where everyone feels a true sense of belonging, and that what matters most in a candidate is having the skills needed to succeed. It inspires us to invest in our talent and support career growth. Join us to challenge yourself with work that matters. This role will be based in Sunnyvale. At LinkedIn, our approach to flexible work is centered on trust and optimized for culture, connection, clarity, and the evolving needs of our business. The work location of this role is hybrid, meaning it will be performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team. At LinkedIn, our Core Infrastructure Engineering organization is the foundation upon which all of our products and services are built. We design, build, and operate the critical systems that enable LinkedIn to serve over a billion members globally, driving reliability, performance, and scalability across the entire platform. Our mission is to provide the foundational software components—including compute infrastructure, object stores, metadata services, pubsub systems, and control planes—that empower all engineering teams at LinkedIn to innovate and scale efficiently. As a principal staff software engineer, you will be at the heart of building and evolving these foundational distributed systems. You will lead the design, development, and implementation of critical new components and platforms that will serve a variety of high-impact use cases across many different platforms and systems. Your work will directly enable the next generation of LinkedIn's products and services. You will be responsible for defining the architectural direction and technical roadmap for one or more of these core systems. This includes making crucial decisions on distributed system design, data consistency, performance optimization, and seamless integration with our existing infrastructure. You will leverage your deep expertise to tackle complex, large-scale challenges and ensure our systems can handle the massive scale of LinkedIn's data and traffic. This individual will be a key technical leader within the core infrastructure engineering team, collaborating closely with other teams across the company to understand their requirements and guide them on best practices for leveraging our foundational platforms. This is a unique opportunity to build core software that will have a direct and lasting impact on virtually every engineering team and product at LinkedIn.

Responsibilities

• Build foundational systems that provide the core building blocks for all of LinkedIn's products.
• Unblock massive-scale projects with your deep expertise in distributed systems, high-availability architecture, and performance optimization.
• Enhance the core infrastructure's ability to serve critical business needs by improving scalability, reliability, and developer productivity.
• Act as the primary domain expert to influence technology choices and define the long-term architectural vision for our core infrastructure.
• Research and develop cutting-edge infrastructure technologies, exploring new paradigms and open-source solutions to drive innovation.
• Build and ship scalable software for foundational tasks, ensuring robust, efficient, and maintainable systems that will serve as the backbone of LinkedIn.
• Drive architectural decisions and implementation across the engineering organization, providing clear guidance and a strong technical vision.
• Provide technical leadership to cross-functional teams, fostering collaboration and shared ownership of key systems.
• Establish a culture that values diverse viewpoints while navigating complex technical decisions.
• Partner effectively with leads from product engineering and other infrastructure teams to anticipate future needs and ensure our systems are prepared to scale.
• Define the bar for quality and efficiency of foundational software systems while balancing critical trade-offs.
• Lead by example to build a culture of craftsmanship, operational excellence, and innovation within the infrastructure organization.
• Be an industry thought leader, representing LinkedIn in relevant forums, conferences, and open-source communities.

Basic Qualifications

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 15+ years of industry experience in the design, development, and operation of large-scale distributed systems.
• Background in one or more of the following areas: distributed systems, networking, storage, or high-performance computing.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science, Distributed Systems, or a related technical field.
• 5+ years in a principal staff, staff, or technical leadership position.
• Experience bringing large-scale foundational infrastructure to production that has served a wide variety of customers.
• Strong technical reputation with a track record of thought leadership, which may include contributions to open-source projects or speaking at major industry conferences.
• Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas: consensus algorithms (e.g., Raft), distributed databases, kernel-level programming, or highly available key-value stores.
• Demonstrated ability to work with peers and stakeholders across teams to set technical direction and drive alignment.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills, with a proven ability to influence technical and non-technical audiences.

Suggested Skills

• Distributed systems design
• Systems programming expertise
• Large-scale data storage
• Networking and protocols
• Consensus algorithms knowledge
• High availability architecture
• Performance optimization techniques
• Cloud infrastructure familiarity

You Will Benefit From Our Culture

We strongly believe in the well-being of our employees and their families. That is why we offer generous health and wellness programs and time away for employees of all levels. LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $218,000 to $357,000. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. This may be different in other locations due to differences in the cost of labor. The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For more information, visit https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits.

Equal Opportunity Statement

We seek candidates with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. LinkedIn considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class. LinkedIn is committed to offering an inclusive and accessible experience for all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. Our goal is to foster an inclusive and accessible workplace where everyone has the opportunity to be successful. If you need a reasonable accommodation to search for a job opening, apply for a position, or participate in the interview process, connect with us at accommodations@linkedin.com and describe the specific accommodation requested for a disability-related limitation. Reasonable accommodations are modifications or adjustments to the application or hiring process that would enable you to fully participate in that process. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to: documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you, having interviews in an accessible location, being accompanied by a service dog, having a sign language interpreter present for the interview.

Pay Transparency Policy Statement

As a federal contractor, LinkedIn follows the pay transparency and non-discrimination provisions described at this link: https://lnkd.in/paytransparency.

Global Data Privacy Notice for Job Candidates

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