Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, built to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
$218,000 - $357,000
Distributed Systems
Principal Software Engineer
Hybrid
5,000+ Employees
8+ years of experience
Enterprise SaaS

Description For Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure

LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, is seeking a Principal Staff Software Engineer to join their Systems Infrastructure team in Mountain View, CA. This is a hybrid role that offers an exciting opportunity to shape the future of LinkedIn's traffic engineering, content delivery, and load balancing infrastructure.

The role sits within the Edge and Traffic team, where you'll be responsible for driving technical direction and development of critical infrastructure components that ensure LinkedIn's reliability and performance at scale. You'll work on sophisticated systems that handle global traffic routing, content delivery, and load balancing, while collaborating with engineers across product and infrastructure teams.

As a technical leader, you'll establish engineering best practices, lead design reviews, and mentor junior engineers. The position requires deep expertise in distributed systems, traffic engineering, and network infrastructure, with hands-on coding experience in languages like Python, Go, or Java. You'll be working with cutting-edge technologies including CDNs, software-defined networking, and modern traffic routing platforms.

The compensation package is highly competitive, ranging from $218,000 to $357,000, plus additional benefits including stock options, health coverage, and performance bonuses. LinkedIn offers a culture built on trust, care, and inclusion, with strong emphasis on employee growth and well-being.

This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced engineer looking to make a significant impact at scale, working with some of the most complex distributed systems challenges in the industry. You'll be part of a team that's essential to LinkedIn's mission of creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, while helping shape the future of how millions of professionals connect and interact online.

Last updated a day ago

Responsibilities For Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure

  • Develop and drive technical roadmaps for LinkedIn's content delivery, proxy, traffic routing, and load balancing infrastructure
  • Establish engineering and design best practices for building high-scale, reliable systems
  • Lead design reviews, incident post-mortems, and production readiness reviews
  • Significantly contribute to key projects design and development
  • Collaborate with workload owners to identify technical requirements
  • Design, deploy, and optimize traffic routing and security over multiple CDNs
  • Drive automation, observability, and fault tolerance initiatives
  • Analyze network traffic telemetry to optimize load balancing
  • Establish and monitor key performance metrics and SLAs
  • Act as a technical mentor for junior engineers

Requirements For Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure

Python
Go
Java
Linux
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Network Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent experience
  • 8+ years of experience in network infrastructure, site reliability engineering, or large-scale distributed systems
  • Expertise in traffic engineering, load balancing, and DNS resolution in high-scale environments
  • Coding experience in Python, Go, Java, or C++
  • Deep understanding of edge networks, CDNs, and software-defined networking (SDN)
  • Experience with networking protocols (BGP, Anycast, TLS, HTTP/2, QUIC)
  • Hands-on experience with traffic routing platforms (IPVS, Apache Traffic Server, HAProxy, Envoy)

Benefits For Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure

Medical Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Equity
  • Generous health and wellness programs
  • Time away for employees of all levels
  • Annual performance bonus
  • Stock options
  • Fair and equitable compensation

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