Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure

LinkedIn•Mountain View, CA

12d•Remote

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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

Nice To Haves

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

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