Principal Software Engineer, Edge and Traffic Infrastructure

Company Description

Linked In is the worlds 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.

This role will be based in Mountain View, CA. 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 team builds high-quality products and services to ensure the health and reliability of Linked In  products empower Linked In 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 Linked In'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.

• Develop and drive technical roadmaps for Linked In'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.

• 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++.

• 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…