Principal Staff AI Engineer, Ads AI

Principal Staff AI Engineer, Ads AI

The Ads Audience and Identity team is responsible for the systems that power LinkedIn's abilities to determine the identity of a visitor, mine troves of activity data to present as a targetable audience, and to balance retrieval against ranking at runtime. We operate at the intersection of machine learning systems (retrieval, prediction, identity graph), backend systems (LLMs, streaming systems, analytics) and product design (how to best present these options to an advertiser, copilots). Together, they power the experiences for advertisers to set up their ad targeting, for us to convince them of the right targeting to use and to finally present what is unique about the audience we deliver to them.

This role will be based in Sunnyvale, CA and will be performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team.

As a Principal Engineer you will be setting the technical direction and foundation to build and own algorithms, models, systems and product experiences that power LinkedIn's Audience and Identity tech platform. We are looking for a high performing and high ambition tech lead who will use AI/ML, Infrastructure and Product Design to push the boundaries of our ads stack and meet the future needs of our B2B advertisers. You will closely work with product and engineering partners (at the level of Directors+ and Principal Engineers+) to define and shape product and technical strategies for LinkedIn's Ads business.

Responsibilities:

• Define and execute technical vision for applying AI and Data Systems to accelerate the team's roadmap which includes activity data mining using LLMs, identity resolution using heterogeneous data sources, ads retrieval at scale and advertiser workflows to build higher performing ads.
• Mentor and work with other Sr. Staff SWEs in the team to establish quality norms, to build a culture of operational excellence and speed.
• Partner with Product, Data Science, and AI Research orgs to translate business goals into scalable AI-and-Data powered capabilities to improve the advertiser experience & ROI.
• Establish best practices for experimentation, model evaluation, and responsible AI.
• Provide architectural guidance and mentorship to up-level the engineering organization
• Work closely with and influence product and/or technology partners regularly to help define roadmap

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years as a Technical Leader (Staff+, Principal, or similar)
• 7+ years of industry experience with Machine Learning, AI, Data Engineering, or related solutions.
• Bachelor of Science (or higher, e.g., MS, or PhD) in Computer Science or related technical field involving coding, or equivalent technical experience.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 10+ years of industry experience (AI, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related) including prior experience working in the Tech or Product domain.
• Master's or PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline.
• Strong experience in designing and optimizing AI solutions for multi-sided marketplaces such as Advertising and E-commerce.
• Experience in designing and optimizing recommender and/or search systems that create highly personalized experiences for LinkedIn's members and scale to solve complex business problems
• Experience with deep learning, LLMs, graphs/graph mining, ranking, auction theory, optimization.
• Expertise in Advertising, Generative AI, Information Retrieval, Knowledge Graph, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision techniques.
• Previous design and implementation of solutions in highly distributed environments.
• Prior work designing and building scalable agentic systems.

Skills:

• Technical Leadership
• AI Engineering
• Enterprise ML Solutions