Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure
LinkedIn · Mountain View, California, United States · hybrid
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.
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.
As part of our world-class software engineering team, you will take the lead in building the next-generation infrastructure and platforms for LinkedIn, including but not limited to: service delivery platform, scalable data storage infrastructure, graph infrastructure, analytics platform, streams processing and data pipelines, cutting-edge search platform, best-in-class AI/ML infrastructure, Kubernetes compute infrastructure, media infrastructure, 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 massive scale. LinkedIn has pioneered many well-known open-source infrastructure projects including Apache Kafka, Pinot, Azkaban, Samza, Venice, Datahub, Feather, etc. We also work with industry standard open source infrastructure technologies 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.
The Metrics Platform team's mission is to provide a highly available and scalable metrics platform that powers the world-class observability solutions needed to support LinkedIn's needs and growth. We build and operate the foundational telemetry systems that every service, engineer, and AI-first product at LinkedIn relies on to understand the health and performance of their systems in near real time.
The platform is a dial-tone-grade, geo-redundant Ring-0 dependency. When it is degraded, the company is effectively flying blind, and critical alerts may not fire. Our customers are, quite literally, every engineering team at LinkedIn.
As a Senior Staff Engineer on the Metrics Platform team, you will set the technical direction for systems operating at company scale:
- Ingest billions of metric events per minute from millions of containers and service instances across LinkedIn's global fleet, enabling rapid ingestion and querying of metric data.
- Store and serve highly multidimensional time-series data with approximately 12 months of retention, preserving historically accurate views while maintaining interactive query latencies.
- Guarantee dial-tone-grade, geo-redundant availability to ensure critical alerts fire on time for every LinkedIn product and infrastructure team.
- Drive cost efficiency and multi-tenancy at scale through write-time aggregations and quota management to protect against metric fan-out.
- Shape LinkedIn's observability for the AI-first future as we enable more agentic flows throughout LinkedIn's engineering systems.
You will lead the strategy, design, implementation, and operation of the Metrics Platform, with direct technical influence across the Observability Engineering organization and partner teams. You will serve as a go-to technical expert for LinkedIn's metrics systems.
What You'll Do
- Own the technical strategy and multi-year roadmap for major components of the Metrics Platform, developing forward-looking solutions to large, open-ended problems that extend beyond the immediate team.
- Design, implement, and optimize large-scale distributed systems across the metrics pipeline, including high-throughput ingestion, multidimensional time-series storage, write-time aggregation, and low-latency querying, with reliability, security, privacy (no PII/EUII in metrics), and cost efficiency built in.
- Solve the most challenging problems in the domain, including metric cardinality and fan-out management, accurate pre-aggregated percentiles, geo-redundant high availability for a Tier-0 service, query performance over large datasets, and efficient long-term retention.
- Improve observability, self-service, and developer productivity for platform customers by enabling querying, dashboarding, and alerting experiences that reduce time to detection and resolution.
- Set the technical bar by establishing engineering best practices, design patterns, and quality standards; leading design reviews; and mentoring Staff and senior engineers to strengthen the technical culture of a fast-moving team (Leadership / Execution / Craft).
- Partner and communicate effectively across the Observability Engineering organization and partner teams, translating business and reliability requirements into robust architectures and clear execution plans spanning multiple quarters and years.
Basic Qualifications
- BA/BS degree in Computer Science or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm-related solutions.
- 5+ years of programming experience in object-oriented languages such as Java, C++, Python, Go, C#, and/or functional languages such as Scala.
- Hands-on experience building and operating distributed systems, large-scale systems, databases, and/or backend APIs.
Preferred Qualifications
- BS and 10+ years, MS and 9+ years, or PhD and 6+ years of relevant work experience.
- Experience in one or more of the following areas: time-series/metrics systems, observability/telemetry platforms, high-throughput streaming pipelines, or OLAP/analytics storage and query engines.
- Experience with technologies such as Kafka, OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Avro, Kubernetes, gRPC, and large-scale time-series/metrics storage and query engines.
- Experience operating dial-tone-grade, geo-redundant services under strict reliability, latency, and cost constraints.
- Experience managing high-cardinality, multidimensional data, pre-aggregation, retention tiering, and query optimization at scale.
- Demonstrated ability to drive cross-team and cross-organizational technical initiatives and influence the direction of foundational systems.
- Experience mentoring Staff and senior engineers and establishing a strong technical culture.
- Experience applying AI/ML to operational problems, such as anomaly detection, forecasting, and automated root-cause analysis, is a plus.
Suggested Skills:
- Distributed Systems
- Technical Leadership
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Systems Infrastructure
LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $198,000 to $326,000. 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.
Equal Opportunity Statement
We seek candidates with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. LinkedIn considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran sta