Principal Staff Software Engineer

Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure - Experimentation Platform

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, every change to our products and services is rigorously tested through experiments to assess their impact on our members and metrics. These experiments are gradually scaled up to evaluate their effects at each stage before moving forward. We conduct thousands of such experiments daily across all our product offerings resulting in millions of evaluations on the platform, and it's crucial that the results and insights are reliable.

To facilitate this, LinkedIn has established a centralized experimentation platform used by all engineering teams to launch new services or product features with an experimentation flag. This platform allows them to set up experiments, scale them safely, observe results, and gain insights into statistical significance and metric impact. The stability, reliability, and observability of these platforms are paramount. Continuous evolution of our tech stack is essential to support the scale of thousands of experiments. Additionally, as we integrate more AI/ML workloads, our experimentation platform must evolve to meet these new demands. Our goal is to transition from a manual design, execution, and reporting process to a fully automated, AI-assisted experience, to drive increase in experimentation velocity.

We are in the process of forming a new team within the Online Infrastructure organization in LinkedIn India to spearhead this initiative, which is being transferred from the US. We are seeking talented engineers at all levels, from Software Engineers through Staff Engineers to join us in this exciting endeavor.

This role will be based in Bangalore, India. 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.

As part of our world-class software engineering team, you will be charged with building the next-generation infrastructure and platforms for LinkedIn, including but not limited to: an application and service delivery platform, massively scalable data storage and replication systems, cutting-edge search platform, best-in-class AI platform, experimentation platform, privacy and compliance platform etc. You will work and learn among the best, putting to use your passion for distributed technologies and algorithms, API design and systems-design, and your passion for writing code that performs at an extreme scale. LinkedIn has already pioneered well-known open-source infrastructure projects like Apache Kafka, Pinot, Azkaban, Samza, Venice, Datahub, Feather, etc. We also work with industry standard open source infrastructure products like Kubernetes, GRPC and GraphQL - come join our infrastructure teams and share the knowledge with a broader community while making a real impact within our company.

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)
• 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

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• BA/BS Degree or higher in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or related practical experience
• 18+ years of programming experience in Java, C++or similar programming languages
• 18+ years' experience building large-scale distributed systems, applications or similar experience
• Hands on experience developing distributed systems, large-scale systems, databases and/or Backend APIs

Additional Information

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or related technical discipline.
• 18+ years of relevant work experience.
• Experience with strategic planning, executing on a long-term roadmap, team development and scaling processes to support business growth.
• Experience with Hadoop (or similar) Ecosystem (Gobblin, Kafka, Iceberg, ORC, MapReduce, Yarn, HDFS, Hive, Spark, Presto)
• Experience with industry, open-source projects and/or academic research in data management, relational databases, and/or large-data, parallel and distributed systems
• Experience in architecting, building, and running large-scale systems
• Experience with open-source project management and governance

Suggested Skills

• Distributed systems
• Backend Systems Infrastructure
• Java

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Experience LevelExecutive Level

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