Principal Staff Software Engineer, Physical Infrastructure

Company Description

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, built to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Our products help people make powerful connections, discover exciting opportunities, build necessary skills, and gain valuable insights every day. We're also committed to providing transformational opportunities for our own employees by investing in their growth. We aspire to create a culture that's built on trust, care, inclusion, and fun – where everyone can succeed.

Join us to transform the way the world works.

Job Description

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.

We are seeking a Principal Staff Software Engineer to join LinkedIn’s Physical Infrastructure organization. As the technical partner to the organizational leader, you will play a critical role in defining the architecture and technical strategy for the software platforms responsible for planning, building, allocating, and managing LinkedIn’s global physical infrastructure.

The Physical Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that translate business and product demand into deployed infrastructure capacity. These platforms support the end-to-end lifecycle of data center capacity, including long-range planning, demand forecasting, site and space planning, hardware procurement, supply-chain coordination, infrastructure construction, hardware allocation, deployment, and lifecycle management.

As our infrastructure consumers and their solutions evolve, this role will also define and manage the contracts between the Physical Infrastructure platform and its customers. You will ensure that platform APIs, data models, workflows, capacity commitments, and service-level expectations remain clear, reliable, scalable, and adaptable to changing requirements.

As a Principal Staff Software Engineer, you will serve as a key technical leader and role model across the Physical Infrastructure organization. You will drive the development of reliable, scalable, and extensible software platforms that enable LinkedIn to expand its infrastructure efficiently while reducing delivery time, operational complexity, and total cost of ownership.

You will work closely with leaders and engineers across Capacity Engineering, Data Center Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Network Engineering, Supply Chain, Finance, Infrastructure Business Engineering, and infrastructure consumer organizations. You will translate complex and sometimes ambiguous business and infrastructure requirements into cohesive technical strategies and end-to-end platform solutions.

You will mentor engineers, establish high standards for technical craftsmanship, and elevate the engineering capabilities of the broader organization. While this is a strategic technical leadership role, you will remain close to implementation by reviewing designs and code, contributing to critical components, and guiding teams toward simple, reliable, maintainable, and well-tested solutions.

Strong technical leadership, systems thinking, cross-functional influence, and a consistent focus on delivering measurable business and infrastructure outcomes are essential for success in this role.

Responsibilities:

• Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for the software platforms that plan, build, allocate, and manage LinkedIn’s global physical infrastructure.
• Design cohesive end-to-end solutions spanning capacity forecasting, infrastructure planning, supply and demand management, procurement, construction, hardware delivery, resource allocation, provisioning, and lifecycle management.
• Establish clear and durable contracts between Physical Infrastructure platforms and their consumers, including APIs, data models, workflow interfaces, service-level objectives, capacity commitments, and change-management processes.
• Drive architectural simplification across fragmented planning and delivery workflows by reducing manual processes, eliminating duplicated data, and creating standardized abstractions across infrastructure domains.
• Improve the reliability of the infrastructure delivery lifecycle by identifying critical dependencies, failure modes, and operational risks across planning, allocation,  provisioning, and deployment systems.
• Drive platform design within PI that supports graceful degradation, reconciliation, idempotency, auditability, disaster recovery, and safe recovery from partial failures across distributed workflows.
• Partner with infrastructure consumer organizations to understand their roadmaps and ensure that the Physical Infrastructure platform can support emerging requirements such as large-scale AI clusters, new hardware architectures, specialized accelerators, high-performance networking, and new deployment models.
• Lead architecture and design decisions across multiple teams and organizational boundaries, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term platform integrity and scalability.
• Identify systemic gaps that span organizational boundaries and create technical strategies that align teams around common data models, interfaces, workflows, and outcomes.
• Establish and champion engineering best practices, including code quality, automated testing, observability, deployment safety, data integrity, API governance, operational readiness, and production ownership.
• Contribute directly to critical designs and implementations when necessary, review pull requests, and guide engineers toward clean, efficient, secure, and maintainable code.
• Drive consensus across cross-functional teams in a highly matrixed organization and communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to engineering, product, operations, finance, and executive stakeholders.

Qualifications

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

• Experience building software platforms for physical infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, data center capacity, hardware lifecycle management, supply-chain systems, resource scheduling, or infrastructure provisioning.
• Working knowledge of physical infrastructure concepts, including hardware provisioning, capacity and topology constraints, failure domains, dependencies, and infrastructure lifecycle workflows.
• Working knowledge of network configuration management techniques, including configuration modeling, intent-based automation, validation, version control, safe deployment, and configuration drift detection.
• Experience supporting AI, machine-learning, data, storage, compute, or high-performance infrastructure at large scale.
• Experience designing systems with strong consistency, reconciliation, workflow orchestration, auditability, fault tolerance, and data-integrity requirements.
• Experience applying machine learning, optimization techniques, or agentic automation to infrastructure planning and operational workflows.
• Experience modernizing legacy platforms, consolidating fragmented systems, and migrating organizations toward common data models and standardized workflows.
• Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and establish a strong culture of technical excellence, operational ownership, and continuous improvement.

Suggested Skills

• Large Distributed Systems
• Physical Infrastructure
• Technical leadership
• Cross functional work

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 $231,000 - $378,000. 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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