Software Engineering Manager, Feature AI Platform

LinkedIn; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 175,000 - 287,000; Full time

Job summary

LinkedIn is hiring to lead the Feature Platform for AI data pipelines at scale. The role blends leadership with hands-on design to process millions of QPS and multi-terabyte datasets using Spark, Beam, and Flink.

You will coach engineers, shape a long-term tech roadmap, ensure data hydration, indexing, and consistency, and collaborate across product teams to deliver high-performance feature data serving.

Qualifications

• BA/BS in Computer Science or related field; equivalent practical experience.
• 1+ year of management experience or 1+ year at staff level with management training.
• 5+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and large-scale software engineering.
• Experience programming in object-oriented languages (Java, C++, Python, Go, or Rust).
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems, databases, and large-scale data systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and manage core team of engineers building the infrastructure.
• Partner with senior management to define a long-term tech roadmap for the team and company.
• Dive deep into technical discussions to challenge status quo and steer the team forward.
• Communicate and collaborate with stakeholders across engineering and business leadership.
• Foster an inclusive environment, set clear expectations, and uphold accountability.
• Drive operational excellence, define performance metrics, and maintain a high quality bar.
• Create an autonomous, transparent, and learning-focused team culture.

Skills

Distributed systems

Data infrastructure

AI infrastructure

Education

BA/BS in Computer Science or related

MS/PhD in Computer Science or related

Tools

Hadoop

Spark

Kubernetes

gRPC

Kafka

Pinot

Flink

Venice

Job 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.

This role will be based in Mountain View, CA.

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.

The team shapes the future of AI with the state-of-the-art Feature Platform, which empowers AI Users to effortlessly create, compute, store, consume, monitor, and govern feature data within online, offline, and nearline environments, optimizing the process for model training, model serving, and candidate retrieval. As a leader in the team, you'll drive technical direction across the online, offline, and nearline spaces at scale (millions of QPS, multi-terabytes of data, etc), developing and refining the infrastructure necessary to transform data into valuable features. Utilizing leading open-source technologies like Spark, Beam, and Flink and more, you will play a crucial role in processing and structuring feature data, ensuring its most optimal storage, and serving feature data with high performance.

The platform is used by AI practitioners at the company to generate and serve features for major products at the company: Feed, Search, Trust, Recruiter, Jobs, etc. You'll explore and innovate within online/offline/nearline data flows — spanning ingestion, transformation, sharding, and materialization — at massive scale (millions of QPS, multi-TB datasets)

• Data hydration pipelines: build and scale pipelines that materialize computed features into KV stores for real-time serving
• Index building for retrieval engines: consume from upstream data sources (streams, batch, feature stores) to build sharded, queryable indexes at scale. Design sharding schemes that balance load, latency, and resource cost across retrieval index shards
• Consistency & freshness: ensure hydrated/indexed data stays consistent and fresh between source-of-truth and serving layer
• Operational scale: manage pipelines/indexes serving millions of QPS with strict SLAs, manage capacity and cost attribution across multiple tenants.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and manage core team of engineers working on building the infrastructure.
• Participate with senior management in developing a long-term technology roadmap for the team and company.
• Have the ability to dive deep into technical discussions to challenge the status quo, and steer the team in the right direction/to push the envelope.
• Communicate and collaborate effectively with stakeholders across engineering and business leadership.
• Help the team realize their potential by setting clear expectations, openly evaluating performance, upholding accountability, and providing challenges to stretch their skills.
• Drive a culture of operational excellence. Lead the team into defining performance goals, metrics and building the infrastructure and tooling necessary to maintain a high quality bar and detect issues in real time.
• Create an inclusive work environment that fosters autonomy, transparency, innovation and learning, while holding a high bar for quality.

Basic Qualifications

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 1+ year(s) of management experience or 1+ year(s) of staff level engineering experience with management training
• 5+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and large-scale software engineering
• Experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, C++, Python, Go or Rust.
• Hands on experience developing distributed systems, databases, large scale data systems

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD in Computer Science or related technical discipline
• 2+ years of hands-on software engineering/technical management and people management experience
• 7+ years industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.
• 5+ years programming experience in languages such as Java, C++, Python, Go, or Rust.
• Experience in architecting, building, and running large-scale distributed systems
• Experience with industry, opensource, and/or academic research in technologies such as Hadoop, Spark, Kubernetes, gRPC, Apache Kafka, Pinot, Flink, or Venice
• Experience working with search and/or recommender systems or other similar large-scale distributed systems.

Suggested Skills

• Distributed systems
• Data Infrastructure
• AI infrastructure

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 $175,000 - $287,000. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, depth of experience, certifications, and specific work location. This may be different in other locations due to differences in the cost of labor.

The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For more 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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• Documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you
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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.

San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, LinkedIn will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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