Principal Staff Software Engineer, Service Infrastructure

This role will be based in Sunnyvale or San Francisco.

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

At LinkedIn the Service Infrastructure (SI) organization provides the foundation for all online services to run reliably efficiently and at scale. We power core technologies that enable every product team at LinkedIn to build deploy and operate their services seamlessly.

gRPC is at the heart of LinkedIns inter-service communication connecting thousands of services across multiple programming languages. Our mission is to define and drive the future of gRPC at LinkedIn evolving the infrastructure to improve reliability performance developer experience and scalability while reducing complexity and operational cost.

As a Principal Staff Engineer in Service Infrastructure you will be the primary domain expert for gRPC and play a critical role in shaping the long-term direction of inter-service communication at LinkedIn. You will lead foundational projects set technical strategy and provide thought leadership that impacts every service and developer at LinkedIn.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical direction for gRPC at LinkedIn balancing scalability reliability developer experience and efficiency.
• Lead large-scale gRPC infrastructure initiatives including evolution from bridged to native gRPC support for multiple programming languages and alignment with LinkedIns platform vision.
• Provide architectural leadership across the engineering organization setting the bar for performance resiliency and security in LinkedIns RPC stack.
• Partner with other senior engineers and managers to drive cross-functional alignment on gRPC strategy and execution.
• Influence how gRPC integrates with the broader service platform including dependency management observability configuration and deployment.
• Act as a mentor and technical leader raising the bar for craftsmanship and guiding engineers across multiple teams.
• Represent LinkedIn externally as an industry thought leader sharing best practices and innovations in large-scale RPC systems.
• Establish a culture of innovation quality and operational excellence ensuring that design and architectural choices optimize for developer productivity and business impact.
• Anticipate future needs in scale and efficiency and proactively identify infrastructure gaps and solutions.
   

Qualifications :

Basic Qualifications:

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline or equivalent practical experience.
• 7 years of industry experience in software design distributed systems or infrastructure engineering.
• 7 years of experience in programming languages such as Java Go C Python or Rust.
• 5 years in an architect or technical leadership role.
• Experience with distributed systems networking or inter-service communication protocols (e.g. gRPC HTTP/2 RPC frameworks).

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building and operating large-scale high-performance infrastructure serving millions of requests per second.
• Expertise in gRPC or equivalent RPC/communication technologies at scale.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts: reliability fault tolerance scalability and performance optimization.
• Experience influencing company-wide technical direction and aligning diverse teams toward a common strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to simplify complex infrastructure problems into developer-friendly solutions.
• Excellent communication skills with a track record of influencing senior leaders and external communities.
• Experience mentoring engineers and cultivating a strong engineering culture.

Suggest Skills

• Distributed systems
• Service Infrastructure
• gRPC or equivalent RPC
• Developing technology strategies at a company-wide scale.
• Technical leadership

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 $218000 to $357000. 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 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 LinkedIns legal duty to furnish information.

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No

Employment Type :

Full-time