Sr. Staff Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure - Observability Engineering Platforms
LinkedIn · Posted Oct 19
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About the role
LinkedIn's Observability Experience group is chartered to simplify and drive observability across the company, and its Observability Platforms sub-team owns the platforms and products for metrics ingestion, storage, retrieval, visualization, alerting, incident creation and escalation, remediation and health-checking, ingesting billions of operational metrics per minute at millions of QPS. The team builds and runs a custom-built, large-scale observability platform covering metrics, logs, traces and events. This role will architect and scale real-time storage and streaming systems, set the technical direction of the platform end to end, and provide architectural guidance and mentorship to engineers.
What you will do
- 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.
Skills used in this role
What the employer is looking for
- 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
Benefits and support
- Generous health and wellness programs
- Time away for employees of all levels
About LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network, connecting over a billion users globally to create economic opportunity. Owned by Microsoft, the platform provides tools for job searching, professional networking, B2B marketing, sales intelligence, and online learning. Through its data graph, it bridges the gap between global talent and enterprise organizations.
- Industry
- Professional Network
- Company size
- 10001+ employees
- Founded
- 2003-05-05
- Location
- Sunnyvale, California, USA
- Funding stage
- Public Company
Funding
Public Company · $103.5M raised
- 2003-11-01Seed$4.7M
- 2004-08-01Series A$10M
- 2007-01-15Series B$53M
- 2008-06-01Series C$22.7M
- 2014-05-15Post Ipo Debt$500M
Leadership
Chief Executive Officer
EVP of LinkedIn and Microsoft Office
President of Platforms and Digital Work
Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer
Senior Vice President & Chief Business Officer
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