Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure - Observability Engineering Platforms

Company Description

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.

Job Description

As part of our world-class software engineering team, you will be building the next-generation observability platforms for LinkedIn, including but not limited to: instrumenting applications and infrastructure to collect meaningful metrics, logs, and traces; Collaborate with development teams to ensure consistent and comprehensive instrumentation across all systems; Develop and maintain libraries, frameworks, and tools to simplify instrumentation. You will work and learn among the best, putting to use your passion for building and scaling observability platforms and your passion for writing code that performs at an extreme scale - come join our Observability Engineering team and share the knowledge with a broader community, while making a real impact within Linkedin.

The Observability Experience (OE) group is charted to simplify and drive observability for LinkedIn. The Observability Platforms (sub team of OE) is responsible for billions of operational metrics ingested every minute within LinkedIn. Observability Platforms maintains the platforms and products for metrics ingestion, storage, retrieval, visualization, alerting, incident creation & escalation, remediation, health-checking and experience platform. We are one of the very few companies globally with a custom-built platform to support billions of metrics ingested at millions of QPS.

This role will be based in Bangalore, India.

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.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, build, run, and scale real-time storage systems that ingest, process, index, and retain observability data at massive scale - spanning ingestion, stream processing, and long-term retention.

• Own the technical direction of the observability platform end to end - the collection, processing, and storage of metrics, logs, traces, and events that engineers across the company rely on - and evolve it so insight keeps pace with the growth of our systems.

• Scale distributed systems and make the hard architectural trade-offs - across processing models, data delivery guarantees, storage tiers, and the balance of cost, latency, and durability - while writing code and delivering with speed and quality.

• Serve as a role model and coach for engineers, with a strong bias for action, providing architectural guidance and mentorship to up-level the engineering organization.\

• Develop multi-tier scalable, high-volume performing, and reliable user-centric applications that operate 24x7. Produce high-quality infrastructure that is thoroughly tested, code reviewed & resilient.

• Partner with teams across the company to drive adoption of the platform(s), turning their instrumentation and diagnostic needs into measurable improvements in engineering productivity.

• Work closely with leadership and product/technology partners to define the roadmap and surface opportunities to improve observability.

• Navigate and resolve cross-team conflicts to align stakeholders and foster a cohesive, collaborative engineering culture.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience

• 12+ years of industry experience in software design and development, with strong problem-solving and system-design skills

• 12+ years of experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, C++, Python, Go, C and/or other Functional languages

• Experience building and operating large-scale streaming and real-time processing systems, including stateful processing and data delivery guarantees

• Hands on experience developing large-scale observability platforms with a deep understanding of distributed systems, microservice architecture, Pub-Sub systems, logging /metrics / tracing platforms

• 5+ years of experience in an architect or technical leadership position

Preferred Qualifications:

• 12+ years of software design and development experience, with 5+ years in a technical leadership position.

• 10+ years of experience with object-oriented design, coding, and testing patterns, and languages such as Java, C++, Go, or Python.

• 8+ years building and optimizing large-scale distributed storage systems and client-server architectures.

• Experience designing and operating large-scale storage and OLAP systems, columnar, time-series, key-value, or log-structured stores such as ClickHouse, Apache Pinot, Apache Druid, BigQuery, Cassandra, or Elasticsearch, with a strong grasp of indexing, compaction, replication, and tiered retention.

• Depth in observability systems across metrics, logs, traces, and events, including high-cardinality ingestion and low-latency query at scale.

• Experience building systems with AI and using AI-powered coding agents and assistants in everyday development to design, implement, test, and review software at a higher velocity and quality bar.

• Ability to work with multiple stakeholders, understand product priorities, think big-picture, and solve core problems efficiently.

• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts and drive technical strategy across teams and geographies.

• Maintainer or contributor of open source projects

Suggested Skills:

• Technical Leadership 

• Backend Systems Infrastructure

• Distributed Systems (Storage)

• Large-Scale Data Storage

• Software Design

• Cross-organizational Collaboration

Additional Information

You will Benefit from our Culture

We strongly believe in the well-being of our employees and their families. That is why we offer generous health and wellness programs and time away for employees of all levels.

India Disability Policy 

LinkedIn is an equal employment opportunity employer offering opportunities to all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. For more information on our equal opportunity policy, please visit https://legal.linkedin.com/content/dam/legal/Policy_India_EqualOppPWD_9-12-2023.pdf

Global Data Privacy Notice for Job Candidates ​

Please follow this link to access the document that provides transparency around the way in which LinkedIn handles personal data of employees and job applicants: https://legal.linkedin.com/candidate-portal.

India Disability Policy 

LinkedIn is an equal employment opportunity employer offering opportunities to all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. For more information on our equal opportunity policy, please visit https://legal.linkedin.com/content/dam/legal/Policy_India_EqualOppPWD_9-12-2023.pdf

Global Data Privacy Notice and Compliance Posters for Job Candidates 

Please use this link to access documents that provide information about how LinkedIn handles the personal data of employees and job applicants, as well as the E-Verify Participation Notice and the Department of Justice Immigrant and Employee Rights Section Right to Work posters: https://www.linkedin.com/legal/candidate-portal.