Staff Network Engineer

LinkedIn•Sunnyvale, CA

7h•$156,000 - $255,000•Hybrid

About The Position

This role will be based in Mountain View, CA. 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. The Production Backbone Network Engineering team is responsible for architecting, building, and operating LinkedIn's global Backbone and Edge network infrastructure that connects our data centres, edge PoPs, cloud environments, transit providers, peers, and internet exchanges. As a Staff Network Engineer, you will play a pivotal role as a technical leader and exemplar within the organisation. We seek an individual who crafts and implements technology solutions aligned with business and technical goals, stays abreast of emerging networking technologies, fosters collaboration across teams, and balances competing priorities to drive successful outcomes. A successful Staff Network Engineer combines deep networking expertise with an automation-first mindset, using automation, infrastructure-as-code, and operational engineering principles to improve the reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency of large-scale production networks.

Requirements

BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
5+ years of experience designing, deploying, and operating large-scale Backbone, WAN, ISP, Edge, or hyperscale networks.
Understanding of networking fundamentals including TCP/IP, BGP, IS-IS, MPLS, RSVP-TE, Segment Routing Traffic Engineering (SR-TE).
Experience operating large-scale service provider, hyperscale, or backbone networks.
Experience with Internet peering, transit providers, IXPs, and WAN traffic engineering.
Experience with Juniper Junos routing platforms and large-scale routing environments.
Understanding of network automation principles and experience working with automation technologies such as Python, Ansible, Terraform, REST/gRPC APIs, NETCONF, YANG, or OpenConfig.
Experience designing and operating cloud network connectivity with one or more public cloud providers (Azure, AWS, or GCP), including hybrid networking architectures and interconnect solutions.
Experience with optical networking technologies including DWDM and optical transport systems.
Hands-on troubleshooting, operational, and incident management experience.

Nice To Haves

7+ years of experience in production network engineering.
Experience designing and evolving global Backbone and Edge network architectures.
Experience operating both Juniper Junos and Arista EOS platforms.
Experience evaluating, qualifying, and deploying new networking hardware and software platforms.
Experience working directly with network equipment vendors, cloud providers, and service providers to influence product direction and technical roadmaps.
Experience leading large-scale network migrations and infrastructure transformation programs.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture, design, and evolution of LinkedIn's global Backbone and Edge network infrastructure.
Drive technical strategy for routing architecture, traffic engineering, scalability, resiliency, and operational excellence.
Review network architectures, designs, provisioning frameworks, and operational tooling, providing recommendations to improve performance, capacity, reliability, security, and observability.
Design, deploy, and operate large-scale Backbone and Edge networks across multiple geographic regions.
Participate in on-call rotations, lead incident response efforts, conduct post-mortems, and drive long-term remediation initiatives.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure network solutions align with business and technical objectives.
Identify operational gaps and develop solutions to automate deployments, reduce toil, and enable auto-remediation of network faults.
Lead complex cross-functional initiatives spanning network infrastructure, edge and CDN teams and automation teams.
Drive network security, compliance, and operational best practices.