Staff Software Engineer - Network Infrastructure

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.

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.

This position will be hybrid in LinkedIn's Mountain View, CA campus.

Team Description:

The Network Infrastructure Software team develops platforms that power intent-based, automated network operations for large-scale data center networks. Our work enables engineers to express what the network should do and rely on software to safely and consistently handle how it gets done. By standardizing and automating provisioning, configuration, security, and operations, we reduce manual intervention, improve observability, and shorten MTTD and MTTR while maintaining high standards for correctness, security, and availability.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will provide technical leadership in building and evolving these platforms at scale. You will design systems that translate intent into reliable automation, collaborate across engineering and operations teams, and make thoughtful trade-offs across reliability, performance, security, and developer experience. This role calls for strong software engineering fundamentals, practical networking knowledge, and the ability to deliver solutions that operate dependably in real-world production environments.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership across the full lifecycle of network infrastructure software, including design, development, testing, deployment, and ongoing operation, with a focus on scalability, performance, and 24x7 reliability.

• Build high-quality, production-grade software with strong engineering discipline, including comprehensive testing, code reviews, and continuous integration.

• Partner closely with network engineering and application teams to shape the technical direction of LinkedIn’s networking platforms, applying modern networking technologies and making informed architectural trade-offs.

• Raise the bar for engineering excellence by defining best practices, driving technical rigor, and mentoring engineers across the team.

• Define and evolve SLIs and SLOs, strengthen observability, and lead incident reviews and long-term corrective actions by partnering across network engineering, security, and infrastructure teams to align on requirements, interfaces, and rollout plans.

Basic Qualifications:

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

• 4+ years experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.

• 4+ years programming experience in object-oriented programming languages such as Golang, Python, Java, C++, Rust.

• Experience with network protocols such as TCP/IP, BGP, MPLS, RDMA, network overlay technologies, and network-based Quality of Service (QoS).

Preferred Qualifications:

• BS and 8+ years of relevant work experience, MS and 7+ years of relevant work experience, or PhD and 4+ years of relevant work experience.

• Network automation / infrastructure platforms experience (configuration/change management, device lifecycle, audits/assurance, topology/state).

• Experience in architecting, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems running in a 24x7 production environment.

• Experience or knowledge in networking programming, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), intent-based configuration management, RDMA/RoCEv2, Segment Routing, and network congestion control algorithms.

• Experience or knowledge in SONiC Network Operating System, Kubernetes & CNI, host networking / TCP tuning.

• Experience or knowledge in network management, configuration generation and provisioning systems and tools. Ansible, REST/gRPC, NETCONF, Jenkins, Puppet, YANG, OpenConfig, etc.

Suggested Skills:

· Technical Leadership

· Architectural Mastery

· Code Review and Quality Assurance

· Network Infrastructure Software

· Mentoring and Knowledge Sharing

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.

LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $152,000 - $248,000. Actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations.

The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For additional information, visit: https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits.

Equal Opportunity Statement 

We seek candidates with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. LinkedIn considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

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Reasonable accommodations are modifications or adjustments to the application or hiring process that would enable you to fully participate in that process. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to:

• Documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you
• Having interviews in an accessible location
• Being accompanied by a service dog
• Having a sign language interpreter present for the interview

A request for an accommodation will be responded to within three business days. However, non-disability related requests, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

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