Staff Software Engineer - Systems and Infrastructure

About the role

As part of our world-class software engineering team, you will help build the next-generation infrastructure and platforms that power LinkedIn's products, business, and AI-first future. This includes data infrastructure, storage systems, streaming platforms, traffic and network infrastructure, and other foundational platforms that enable reliable, scalable, and AI-first product experiences.

Our infrastructure enables teams across LinkedIn to build, deploy, and operate AI-first products at scale. You will work on foundational systems that make it possible to process massive volumes of data, serve low-latency online experiences, power personalized and AI-first user experiences, and ensure reliability, security, privacy, and compliance across the full technology stack.

We are building next-generation data infrastructure, including storage, streams, and analytics platforms. You will help scale LinkedIn's infrastructure to handle massive data growth across the LinkedIn ecosystem as we continue to grow our membership, products, and AI-first experiences. Bring your experience in distributed systems and algorithms, along with a strong systems orientation across concurrency, scalability, performance, caching, queuing, and distributed data storage. You should be excited to work on cutting-edge infrastructure systems that make a real impact at company scale.

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.

Responsibilities

• You will own the technical strategy for broad or complex requirements with insightful and forward-looking approaches that go beyond the direct team and solve large open-ended problems.
• You will design, implement, and optimize the performance of large-scale distributed systems with security and compliance in mind.
• You will Improve the observability and understandability of various systems with a focus on improving developer productivity and system sustenance.
• You will effectively communicate with the team, partners and stakeholders.
• You will mentor other engineers, define our challenging technical culture, and help to build a fast-growing team.
• You will work closely with the open-source community to participate and influence cutting edge open-source projects (e.g., Apache Iceberg, Apache Airflow, Apache Flink).
• You will deliver incremental impact by driving innovation while iteratively building and shipping software at scale.
• You will diagnose technical problems, debug in production environments, and automate routine tasks.

Basic Qualifications

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or related practical experience.
• 4+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.
• 4+ years experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, C++, Python, Go, Rust, C# and/or Functional languages such as Scala or other relevant coding languages.
• Hands on experience developing distributed systems, large-scale systems, databases and/or Backend APIs.

Preferred Qualifications

• BS and 8+ years of relevant work experience, MS and 7+ years of relevant work experience, or PhD and 4+ years of relevant work experience.
• Experience in architecting, building, and running large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with industry, open source, and/or academic research in technologies such as GCP, S3, Azure, Iceberg, Spark, Flink, Trino, Airflow, Kubernetes, GraphQL, GRPC, Kafka, Pinot, ClickHouse, or Cassandra.
• Experience with open-source project management and governance.

Suggested Skills

• Distributed systems
• Backend Systems Infrastructure
• Java/Golang/Rust/Python

Additional Information: 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 $175,000 - $287,000. 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.