Principal Software Engineer - Data Lake Infrastructure

• Full-time
• Workplace Type:
  Hybrid

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 Mountain View or Bellevue.

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 Data Lake Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational storage and table-management technologies powering Linked In's data platform at massive scale. We own Open House, Linked In's open-source control plane for Apache Iceberg tables, along with the broader data lake stack (storage engines, table formats, metadata/catalog services, and compaction/retention systems) that serves thousands of internal teams, petabyte-scale datasets, and mission-critical analytics, ML, and AI workloads.

We collaborate closely with open-source communities (Apache Iceberg, Trino, Spark) and partner teams across Data Infrastructure, Analytics, and AI Platform to ensure reliable, cost-efficient, and governable data access company-wide.

We are seeking a Principal Technical Lead to drive the technical vision and execution for Open House and Linked In's data lake technologies. You will set architectural direction, lead complex cross-team initiatives, and mentor engineers building the next generation of table-management and lakehouse infrastructure. This role combines deep hands-on engineering with technical leadership — you'll design for scale, reliability, and openness while representing Linked In in the broader open-source data lake ecosystem.

Come join our infrastructure teams and share the knowledge with a broader community while making a real impact within our company.

• Own the technical roadmap and architecture for Open House and core data lake services (catalog, table format, compaction, retention, replication, governance).
• Lead design and implementation of large-scale, highly available distributed systems handling petabyte-scale Iceberg tables.
• Drive open-source contributions and engagement with Apache Iceberg and related ecosystem projects.
• Partner with Analytics, AI Platform, and Data Infra teams to align on requirements, integration points, and long-term platform strategy.
• Provide technical mentorship and code/design review leadership across the team; raise the engineering bar.
• Evaluate and adopt emerging lakehouse technologies, driving build-vs-adopt decisions.
• Ensure system reliability, performance, and cost efficiency through sound SLOs, monitoring, and capacity planning.
• Lead technical design reviews, write RFCs/design docs, and drive consensus across stakeholders.
• Guide incident response and root-cause analysis for critical data lake infrastructure issues.
• Guide incident response and root-cause analysis for critical data lake infrastructure issues.

• BS in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 10+ yearsof industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.
• 10+ years of experience in technical leadership: architecture ownership, mentoring, cross-team influence.
• 8+ years of experience in table formats (Iceberg/Delta/Hudi), data lake/lakehouse architectures, and query engines (Spark, Trino, Presto).
• 8+ years building large-scale distributed data systems (storage, databases, data lakes, or data infrastructure)
• 10+ years of experience in systems programming (Java/Scala/Go) and understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (consistency, replication, metadata management.
• 8+ years of experience with Open-source contribution experience preferred, especially in Apache Iceberg or similar projects.

• MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field.
• Experience in architecting, building, and running large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with…