Director, Software Engineering, Systems Infrastructure

Overview

Company Description
Linked In is the world’s largest professional network, built to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. We’re committed to growth for our employees and a culture built on trust, care, inclusion, and fun – where everyone can succeed. Join us to transform the way the world works.

The Director of Validation Engineering is a senior leadership role within Linked In’s engineering organization. This role leads the team responsible for building scalable, self-service validation platforms that serve as the final line of defense for all changes deployed to production. The organization ensures that changes across Linked In’s engineering ecosystem are released safely, reliably, and at speed within the continuous delivery (CD) environment.

This position owns the policy and technology enforcement for all production change vectors, including A/B experimentation, software releases, static and dynamic configuration changes, and other production-impacting updates. The Director partners broadly across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to balance safety, reliability, and developer productivity. The work location for this role is hybrid (home and Linked In office on select days) as determined by business needs.

This role is based in Mountain View, CA.

• Partner across engineering to understand requirements for safe production changes while preserving high development velocity.
• Define and own the roadmap for self-service platforms that enable safe, scalable production releases within the CD ecosystem.
• Establish and enforce policies and technical controls for experimentation, software releases, configuration management, and all other production change mechanisms.
• Act as a role model and coach for engineers and managers by setting clear expectations, providing candid feedback, and fostering accountability and growth.
• Collaborate with senior leadership to co-develop long-term reliability and validation strategy aligned with Linked In’s product and technology vision.
• Drive adoption of reliability best practices, including SLO definition, continuous SLO improvement, and a strong culture of ownership and accountability.
• Develop and operationalize metrics, tools, and dashboards to measure system health, operational performance, and the effectiveness of reliability initiatives.
• Own and drive improvements across end-to-end infrastructure and systems with a focus on validation, safety, and resilience.
• Serve as a domain expert by staying current on industry trends and applying modern validation and reliability best practices.
• Hire, develop, and retain high-performing engineering leaders and engineers across a range of experience levels.
• Build strong partnerships with product, infrastructure, and application engineering teams.
• Lead complex, cross-organizational initiatives by aligning stakeholders, managing risk, making informed tradeoffs, and delivering high-quality outcomes on time.

Basic Qualifications

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science or a related field
• 7+ years in Engineering leadership focused on dev/ops based roles leading teams of engineers
• 5+ years in experience with reliability engineering, operating systems at large scale
• 4+ years of building software to simplifying operations and reducing toil in managing large scale infrastructure

Preferred Qualifications

• A background in hands-on development in programming/scripting languages such as Python, Go, Java or Ruby
• Experience attracting, retaining, and developing top engineering talent throughout the industry
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams
• The ability to balance business needs, urgency, constraints, and shipping high-quality solutions in a fast-moving company
• Led large engineering teams of 40+
• Data-driven decision making using operational and reliability metrics
• Pragmatic tradeoff analysis between safety, speed, and business impact
• Cross-org technical leadership and stakeholder alignment
• Strong engineering management, coaching, and talent development

• Large-scale systems reliability and…