Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems 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. 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 Staff Software Engineer to join our organization. The team builds and evolves the foundational platforms that keep LinkedIn’s services reliable, scalable, secure, and high-performing at global scale.

As a Principal Staff Engineer, you will serve as a senior technical leader and architect responsible for defining and driving next-generation infrastructure that powers AI-first unified developer platforms — enabling engineers and AI agents to collaboratively build, deploy, and operate software with confidence.

Responsibilities:

• Architect large-scale infrastructure systems for end-to-end software lifecycle platforms
• Design unified CI/CD and deployment platforms spanning build, test, deploy, and runtime operations
• Build observability, monitoring, and cost visibility systems for production infrastructure
• Develop real-time data pipelines and online serving systems supporting automated or AI-assisted operations
• Design service infrastructure where automated systems or AI agents interact with deployments, traffic, and runtime environments
• Lead Kubernetes-based compute orchestration for large-scale workload management
• Build declarative, version-controlled infrastructure and platform management systems
• Define security-by-design standards across the software development lifecycle
• Set infrastructure architecture and technical direction across teams and cloud environments
• Lead architecture, design reviews, and implementation of foundational infrastructure systems
• Review system designs, resolve architectural trade-offs, and mentor engineers on scalable system design

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• BS/BA in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent technical experience
• 10+ years of experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions
• 5+ years of experience as an architect or in a technical leadership position
• Experience designing and building distributed systems, service infrastructure, or related systems

Preferred Qualifications:

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or related field
• 12+ years of experience in software design with at least 5 years in a technical leadership position
• Experience architecting and operating large-scale distributed systems, including service delivery, load balancing, traffic management, service mesh, and Kubernetes-based compute infrastructure
• Experience with large-scale data and storage systems, including online databases, distributed caching, and high-availability architectures
• Architectural expertise in developer platform infrastructure, including CI/CD pipelines, deployment systems, and end-to-end software lifecycle platforms
• Experience designing declarative, version-controlled infrastructure and cloud-native systems using technologies such as Kubernetes, Envoy, gRPC, or Apache Kafka
• Experience building production observability, monitoring, cost visibility, real-time data, and online serving infrastructure for large-scale platforms
• Track record of leading large-scale infrastructure initiatives across multiple engineering organizations, including Kubernetes orchestration and automated or AI-assisted operations
• Demonstrated ability to define infrastructure strategy, drive cross-organization technical initiatives, and align architectural decisions with business outcomes

Suggested Skills

• Distributed Systems Design
• Online Databases
• Caching Infrastructure
• High-availability Systems
• Load Balancing
• Service Mesh / Envoy
• Kubernetes
• Technical Leadership

LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.    

The pay range for this role is $226,000 to $369,000. 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. For more information, visit https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits. 

Additional Information

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.

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.

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Reasonable accommodations are modifications or adjustments to the application or hiring process that would enable you to fully participate in that process. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to:

• Documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you
• Having interviews in an accessible location
• Being accompanied by a service dog
• Having a sign language interpreter present for the interview

A request for an accommodation will be responded to within three business days. 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.

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Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, LinkedIn will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Pay Transparency Policy Statement ​

As a federal contractor, LinkedIn follows the Pay Transparency and non-discrimination provisions described at this link: https://lnkd.in/paytransparency.

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Please use this link to access documents that provide information about how LinkedIn handles the personal data of employees and job applicants, as well as the E-Verify Participation Notice and the Department of Justice Immigrant and Employee Rights Section Right to Work posters: https://www.linkedin.com/legal/candidate-portal.