Staff Software Engineer - Identity and Verifications Team

About the role

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.

Team Description: LinkedIn's Trust Verifications team is building the identity and trust infrastructure that helps make LinkedIn a safer and more authentic professional network.

Our systems power verification experiences and trusted identity signals across LinkedIn, supporting use cases spanning member identity, employment and workplace verification, trusted hiring experiences, and portable professional identity across partner ecosystems.

The technical problems we solve sit at the intersection of digital identity, trust and abuse prevention, distributed systems, high-scale serving infrastructure, partner APIs, and member-facing product experiences.

We build platforms that integrate with multiple identity providers and verification methods, process signals across real-time, nearline, and offline systems, and make trustworthy verification data available safely and reliably across LinkedIn products and external integrations.

About the role: We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to serve as a system architect and technical anchor for our Trust and Verifications organization. This role sits at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, identity and trust infrastructure, product architecture, reliability, data, and business strategy.

You will partner closely with engineering and product leadership to translate ambiguous product and business opportunities into scalable technical strategies and durable platform capabilities.

You will be expected to see beyond an individual service or project: understand how systems interact across organizational boundaries, identify where common abstractions and platform investments are needed, and make architectural decisions that allow the organization to move faster over time. The ideal candidate combines deep backend and distributed-systems expertise with strong product judgment.

You can move fluidly between business goals, product requirements, APIs, data models, storage systems, distributed workflows, operational characteristics, and measurable outcomes. You bring a high technical bar, meticulous attention to detail, strong ownership, intellectual curiosity, and a solutions-oriented mindset.

You proactively identify risks, failure modes, and edge cases; communicate clearly when trade-offs exist; and help teams converge on pragmatic architectures that are scalable, reliable, secure, and evolvable.

Responsibilities

Own Technical Strategy & Architecture: Define the technical strategy and architecture for a major product or platform area. Make long-term architectural decisions around system boundaries, APIs, data models, modularity, scalability, extensibility, security, and reliability.

Translate Product Strategy into Systems: Work closely with product and engineering leadership to understand business goals and translate them into scalable technical capabilities. Recognize when an individual product requirement should become a reusable platform primitive rather than a one-off implementation.

Design Large-Scale Distributed Systems: Architect complex distributed systems spanning synchronous APIs, asynchronous workflows, messaging and event-driven architectures, caching, relational and non-relational storage, and distributed state management. Build for Trust & Integrity: Design systems where correctness, data integrity, security, privacy, and abuse resistance are first-class architectural considerations.

• Think deeply about state transitions, data provenance, consistency, authorization, failure handling, and edge cases.
• Design for Reliability & Operational Excellence: Build systems that are observable, resilient, recoverable, and easy to operate.
• Proactively identify failure modes, capacity risks, dependency failures, data consistency issues, and operational edge cases before they become production incidents.

• Connect Architecture to Metrics: Define the engineering, product, and operational metrics required to understand whether a system is succeeding.
• Ensure architectures include the telemetry and observability needed to measure reliability, performance, adoption, conversion, quality, and business impact.
• Navigate Ambiguity: Take loosely defined or cross-cutting problems and create clarity.

Ask the questions that expose hidden assumptions, identify technical and product trade-offs, and help teams converge on a clear strategy. Lead Across Organizational Boundaries & Raise the Engineering Bar: Set a high standard for system design, implementation quality, testing, code review, observability, and operational readiness.

Identify systemic engineering weaknesses and drive investments that improve the organization as a whole. Remain Hands-On: Stay sufficiently close to implementation to validate architecture through code, prototypes, design reviews, debugging, and critical-path development.

Multiply Other Engineers: Mentor senior engineers, create clear technical ownership boundaries, lead design and RFC reviews, and help other engineers develop stronger system-design and technical-leadership skills.

Basic Qualifications

Ba/bs

• Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or related practical experience.
• 4+ years experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.
• 4+ years programming experience in object-oriented programming languages such as Python, Java, JavaScript, C/C++, C#, Objective-C, or Ruby.

Pay and benefits

BS and 8+ years of relevant experience, MS and 7+ years of relevant experience, or PhD and 4+ years of relevant experience. Demonstrated experience owning the architecture of large-scale distributed systems serving high-volume, business-critical workloads.

Deep understanding of distributed-systems fundamentals, including consistency, availability, idempotency, retries, distributed state, failure recovery, and asynchronous system design. Strong experience with relational and non-relational storage systems, including data modeling, indexing, consistency models, scaling strategies, and operational trade-offs.

Proven experience designing event-driven and message-streaming architectures and systems spanning online, nearline, streaming, and offline processing. Strong experience designing APIs and platform abstractions consumed by multiple products, engineering teams, or external partners.

Experience building highly reliable systems with strong practices around observability, SLOs, capacity management, dependency resilience, failure isolation, and automated recovery. Strong product judgement, analytical and metrics orientation, with experience connecting infrastructure and system metrics to product, customer, or business outcomes.

Proven ability to take ambiguous, cross-functional business problems and convert them into clear technical strategies and multi-quarter architectural roadmaps. Experience authoring technical strategy documents and RFCs and driving architecture decisions across multiple engineering teams. Demonstrated ability to influence senior engineers, product leaders, and engineering leadership across organizational boundaries.

Experience with digital identity, trust, security, privacy, fraud and abuse prevention, API platforms, or other high-integrity systems is a strong plus.

Core Skills for Success Technical Leadership Architectural Mastery Ops Excellence, Code Review and Quality Assurance Meticulous Risk Analysis & Edge-Case Identification around Trust & Safety Mentoring and Knowledge Sharing 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 $156,000 - $255,000. 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.

Additional Information

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. However, non-disability related requests, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

LinkedIn will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant.

However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by LinkedIn, or (c) consistent with LinkedIn's legal duty to furnish information.

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. However, non-disability related requests, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

LinkedIn will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant.

However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by LinkedIn, or (c) consistent with LinkedIn's legal duty to furnish information.