Principal Software Engineer, Development Infrastructure

Job Description

Linked In 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 Bellevue, WA. At Linked In, 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 Linked In office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team.

The Development Infrastructure (DI) organization has the mission of making everyone in Linked In R&D more productive and successful. The charter includes all the core infrastructure to Discover, Write, Build, Test and Deploy code.

As a Principal Staff Software Engineer within DI, you will help envision the next generation, agent‑centric, large‑scale development infrastructure at Linked In, providing a delightful experience for our R&D teams. You will identify, develop, and lead strategic investments to make development iterations faster and make step‑function improvements in the lives of developers. You will have the opportunity to engage the industry‑wide developer community and contribute to open‑source software as well.

The successful candidate will be a strong thought leader in the developer productivity space.

• Grow, develop, and mentor a team that provides engineering systems which enable all Linked In developers to build services for Linked In members and Enterprise customers productively, with consistently high quality, and with minimal friction.
• Work across Engineering to build relationships with other teams and use their feedback and understand their goals to build and prioritize a strategy and roadmap for your team, and for products that may span multiple teams.
• Own the design, development, testing, deployment and craft of your team’s infrastructure and systems, with high reliability and scalability.
• Leverage your deep and broad technical expertise to mentor engineers and provide leadership on resolving complex technology issues.
• Build operational excellence roadmaps, drive adoption of best practices from design to delivery, and improve developer feature/code velocity.

• BA/BS Degree or higher in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or related practical experience.
• 10+ years of programming experience in Java, C++, C#, or similar programming languages.
• 7+ years of experience building large-scale distributed applications.
• 7+ years in a technical leadership role overseeing large, cross‑functional teams.
• 3+ years of experience building developer infrastructure and services, including development and code collaboration environments, CI/CD platforms, and measuring software development productivity and quality.

• Dream big. Make big, bold moves to define and build the next generation of developer infra and inspire others to do the same.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with an ability to communicate technical strategy and roadmap in a clear, precise, and actionable manner.
• Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science or related field.
• Deep understanding of the Software development Life Cycle and related build and test systems.
• Shipped several large‑scale projects with multiple dependencies across teams.
• Engagement in coaching and mentoring fellow engineers in their careers.
• Experience attracting, retaining, and developing engineering and operations talent throughout the industry.

• Technical Leadership
• Experience developing technical strategy
• Developer Tools & Automation
• Quality & Testing Infrastructure

We strongly believe in the well‑being of our employees and their families. That…