Principal Staff Software Engineer, Infrastructure SRE

At LinkedIn, our approach to flexible work is centered on trust and optimized for culture, connection, clarity, and the evolving needs of our business. This role may be remote or hybrid. At LinkedIn, hybrid roles are performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team. Remote roles are performed from the designated home work location upon time of hire, and any changes to this home work location requires a review of remote status and approval. 

We are seeking a Principal-level Technical Lead to join LinkedIn's Infrastructure SRE organization. As the technical partner to the organizational leader, you will play a critical role in designing and implementing end-to-end solutions for the platform. The organization encompasses Site Health and Operations, Embedded Infrastructure SRE (supporting Data Infrastructure and Data/AI Platform partners), and Data Automation. The ideal candidate will have proven expertise in these domains, enabling them to design and lead comprehensive solutions that integrate seamlessly across the entire platform.

As a Principal Staff Software Engineer, you will serve as a key technical leader and role model within the Infra SRE organization, driving the development of scalable and reliable infrastructure operations solutions powered by AI/ML. With the industry increasingly focused on AI, our efforts are aimed at enhancing productivity by building and deploying AI/ML solutions at scale in a sustainable manner, enabling the industrialization of AI.

In this role, you will mentor team members, set a high standard for technical craftsmanship, and help elevate the team’s capabilities. You will also champion LinkedIn’s Core Values of transformation, collaboration, and results, fostering a culture that aligns with these principles. From time to time you may have to jump in to do hands-on coding and often review PRs from other engineers and guide them towards clean, efficient, bug-free code. You should inspire the team to maintain code hygiene, unit testing, test coverage and other better engineering practices.

You will work closely with partners and customer stakeholders to strategize, design, and lead innovative solutions while taking a hands-on approach to problem-solving. Strong leadership skills and a focus on delivering high-quality solutions are essential for success in this role.

Responsibilities:

• We take an engineering-first approach to elevate infrastructure operations and reliability. As a Principal Engineer, you’ll be driving the strategy to bring down the total cost of ownership to run and operate our infrastructure.
• Build platforms to augment end-to-end reliability and scalability of LinkedIn’s platforms, services, and products and bring actionable operational insights to enable continuous improvement.
• You will be defining appropriate Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and managing error budgets to balance reliability with innovation and feature development for infrastructure.
• Scale: our data footprint continues to grow exponentially beyond 100s of thousands of servers, multiple exabytes of storage, 10s of trillions of events/messages - arrive at a cohesive strategy and best practices to continue to scale our footprint 10x.
• Cloud-based ecosystems are rapidly evolving. In this role, you will be expected to stay up to date with the latest cloud trends, including Kubernetes, serverless technologies, containers, and best practices for managing and optimizing large-scale infrastructure performance and help define our strategy and roadmap to set us up to be competitive and get ahead of the trends.
• Provide architectural guidance and mentorship to elevate the engineering organization, actively enhancing craftsmanship at LinkedIn by establishing best practices and strategic approaches.
• Influence and lead architecture and design decisions with a strong focus on ensuring Site Up as the top priority
• Drive consensus across cross-functional teams within a matrixed organization, fostering alignment and building a cohesive and collaborative team culture.

Basic Qualifications:

• 10+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions
• 10+ years of experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, Go, C/C++, Rust, Rust, Python
• Hands-on experience developing large-scale distributed systems
• 4+ years of experience as an architect, or technical leadership position
• BS/BA in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent technical experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• MS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience working in the site reliability space
• Professional experience working in the technology industry
• Experience with Data Infrastructure tech stacks: Kafka/PubSub systems, Flink, Airflow, ETL framework and distributed storage (HDFS, S3/EBS, Object Storage, Couchbase, or similar)
• Experience architecting and launching complex AI and engineering projects
• Experience leading and influencing within large, matrixed organization
• Experience leading high-impact, cross-organization initiatives.

Suggested Skills:

• Large Distributed Systems
• Architecture
• Developing technology strategies at a company-wide scale.
• Technical leadership
• Cross functional work

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 $226,000 - $369,000. Actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations.

The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For additional 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.

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