Principal Staff Software Architect - Physical Infrastructure

LinkedIn; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 231,000 - 378,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellness programs

Stock options / equity

Job summary

LinkedIn is seeking a Principal Staff Software Engineer to join its Physical Infrastructure organization. This role defines architecture and technical strategy for software platforms that plan, build, allocate, and manage global physical infrastructure, spanning data center capacity, lifecycle management, and procurement.

You will mentor engineers, review designs, and guide teams toward reliable, scalable solutions while maintaining close to implementation through code and design reviews.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.
• 10+ years of experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, Go, C/C++, Rust, Rust, Python.
• Hands-on experience developing large-scale distributed systems.
• 4+ years of experience as an architect, or technical leadership position.
• BS/BA in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent technical experience.

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical strategy and architecture for the software platforms that plan, build, allocate, and manage LinkedIn’s global physical infrastructure.
• Design cohesive end-to-end solutions spanning capacity forecasting, infrastructure planning, supply and demand management, procurement, construction, hardware delivery, resource allocation, provisioning, and lifecycle management.
• Establish clear and durable contracts between Physical Infrastructure platforms and their consumers, including APIs, data models, workflow interfaces, service-level objectives, capacity commitments, and change-management processes.
• Drive architectural simplification across fragmented planning and delivery workflows by reducing manual processes, eliminating duplicated data, and creating standardized abstractions across infrastructure domains.
• Improve the reliability of the infrastructure delivery lifecycle by identifying critical dependencies, failure modes, and operational risks across planning, allocation, provisioning, and deployment systems.
• Drive platform design within PI that supports graceful degradation, reconciliation, idempotency, auditability, disaster recovery, and safe recovery from partial failures across distributed workflows.
• Partner with infrastructure consumer organizations to understand their roadmaps and ensure that the Physical Infrastructure platform can support emerging requirements such as large-scale AI clusters, new hardware architectures, specialized accelerators, high-performance networking, and new deployment models.
• Lead architecture and design decisions across multiple teams and organizational boundaries, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term platform integrity and scalability.
• Identify systemic gaps that span organizational boundaries and create technical strategies that align teams around common data models, interfaces, workflows, and outcomes.
• Establish and champion engineering best practices, including code quality, automated testing, observability, deployment safety, data integrity, API governance, operational readiness, and production ownership.
• Contribute directly to critical designs and implementations when necessary, review pull requests, and guide engineers toward clean, efficient, secure, and maintainable code.
• Drive consensus across cross-functional teams in a highly matrixed organization and communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to engineering, product, operations, finance, and executive stakeholders.

Skills

Technical leadership

Cross-functional work

Systems thinking

Education

BS/BA in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Java

Go

C/C++

Rust

Python

Job description

LinkedIn is seeking a Principal Staff Software Engineer to join its Physical Infrastructure organization. This role defines architecture and technical strategy for software platforms that plan, build, allocate, and manage global physical infrastructure, spanning data center capacity, lifecycle management, and procurement.

You will mentor engineers, review designs, and guide teams toward reliable, scalable solutions while maintaining close to implementation through code and design reviews.