Principal Staff Software Engineer

Job Description

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 team builds high-quality products and services to ensure the health and reliability of LinkedIn at scale. Our products empower LinkedIn engineers to deliver value to members at a high velocity and without defects. We strive to prevent these defects early in the SDLC process, automating solutions to mitigate issues on behalf of engineers when possible. In addition, our metrics have high visibility across R&D and are leveraged by the lines of business to drive long-term strategy and investment in their organizations.

As a Technical Lead on the Edge and Traffic team, you will drive the technical direction and development of LinkedIn's traffic engineering, content delivery, and load balancing infrastructure. You will play a critical role in shaping the scalability, reliability, and efficiency of our global traffic systems while collaborating closely with engineers across product and infrastructure teams to build the next generation of high-performance networking solutions.

Responsibilities

• 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, and performant traffic systems.
• Lead design reviews, incident post-mortems, and production readiness reviews, ensuring adherence to reliability and scalability standards.
• Significantly contribute to the design and development of key projects, providing hands-on engineering leadership.
• Collaborate closely with workload owners to identify and address both current and emerging technical requirements.
• Design, deploy, and optimize traffic routing and security over multiple content delivery networks.
• Implement and maintain proxy systems to enhance traffic distribution, load balancing, and fault tolerance.
• Drive automation, observability, and fault tolerance initiatives, reducing downtime and improving MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery).
• Analyze network traffic telemetry to optimize load balancing, manage traffic spikes, and plan for future capacity needs.
• Establish and monitor key performance metrics, SLAs, and SLOs for DNS and traffic routing systems.
• Act as a technical mentor, recruiting, developing, and coaching junior engineers to strengthen the team's expertise.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• 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, globally distributed environments.
• Coding experience in one or more languages such as Python, Go, Java, or C++.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline
• 10+ years experience working in cloud-scale or web-scale environments.
• Deep understanding of edge networks, CDNs, and software-defined networking (SDN).
• Experience with networking protocols and traffic management technologies (e.g., BGP, Anycast, TLS, HTTP/2, QUIC).
• Hands-on experience with traffic routing platforms such as IPVS, Apache Traffic Server (ATS), HAProxy, or Envoy.
• Proven ability to drive architectural decisions, solve complex scaling challenges, and optimize system performance.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence and align cross-functional teams.

Suggest Skills

• Edge & Network Engineering
• Load Balancing
• Distributed Systems
• Technical Leadership

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 $218,000 to $357,000. 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 https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits.