Principal Staff Software Engineer, Physical Infrastructure

Company DescriptionLinkedIn 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 DescriptionAt 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.We are seeking a Principal Staff Software Engineer to join LinkedIn’s Physical Infrastructure organization. As the technical partner to the organizational leader, you will play a critical role in defining the architecture and technical strategy for the software platforms responsible for planning, building, allocating, and managing LinkedIn’s global physical infrastructure.The Physical Infrastructure organization builds and operates the systems that translate business and product demand into deployed infrastructure capacity. These platforms support the end-to-end lifecycle of data center capacity, including long-range planning, demand forecasting, site and space planning, hardware procurement, supply-chain coordination, infrastructure construction, hardware allocation, deployment, and lifecycle management.As our infrastructure consumers and their solutions evolve, this role will also define and manage the contracts between the Physical Infrastructure platform and its customers. You will ensure that platform APIs, data models, workflows, capacity commitments, and service-level expectations remain clear, reliable, scalable, and adaptable to changing requirements.As a Principal Staff Software Engineer, you will serve as a key technical leader and role model across the Physical Infrastructure organization. You will drive the development of reliable, scalable, and extensible software platforms that enable LinkedIn to expand its infrastructure efficiently while reducing delivery time, operational complexity, and total cost of ownership.You will work closely with leaders and engineers across Capacity Engineering, Data Center Engineering, Hardware Engineering, Network Engineering, Supply Chain, Finance, Infrastructure Business Engineering, and infrastructure consumer organizations. You will translate complex and sometimes ambiguous business and infrastructure requirements into cohesive technical strategies and end-to-end platform solutions.You will mentor engineers, establish high standards for technical craftsmanship, and elevate the engineering capabilities of the broader organization. While this is a strategic technical leadership role, you will remain close to implementation by reviewing designs and code, contributing to critical components, and guiding teams toward simple, reliable, maintainable, and well-tested solutions.Strong technical leadership, systems thinking, cross-functional influence, and a consistent focus on delivering measurable business and infrastructure outcomes are essential for success in this role.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.QualificationsBasic Qualifications10+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions10+ years of experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, Go, C/C++, Rust, Rust, PythonHands-on experience developing large-scale distributed systems4+ years of experience as an architect, or technical leadership positionBS/BA in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent technical experiencePreferred QualificationsExperience building software platforms for physical infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, data center capacity, hardware lifecycle management, supply-chain systems, resource scheduling, or infrastructure provisioning.Working knowledge of physical infrastructure concepts, including hardware provisioning, capacity and topology constraints, failure domains, dependencies, and infrastructure lifecycle workflows.Working knowledge of network configuration management techniques, including configuration modeling, intent-based automation, validation, version control, safe deployment, and configuration drift detection.Experience supporting AI, machine-learning, data, storage, compute, or high-performance infrastructure at large scale.Experience designing systems with strong consistency, reconciliation, workflow orchestration, auditability, fault tolerance, and data-integrity requirements.Experience applying machine learning, optimization techniques, or agentic automation to infrastructure planning and operational workflows.Experience modernizing legacy platforms, consolidating fragmented systems, and migrating organizations toward common data models and standardized workflows.Proven ability to mentor senior engineers and establish a strong culture of technical excellence, operational ownership, and continuous improvement.Suggested SkillsLarge Distributed SystemsPhysical InfrastructureTechnical leadershipCross functional workAdditional InformationYou will Benefit from our CultureWe 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 $231,000 - $378,000. 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: 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.LinkedIn is committed to offering an inclusive and accessible experience for all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. Our goal is to foster an inclusive and accessible workplace where everyone has the opportunity to be successful.If you need a Reasonable Accommodation to search for a job opening, apply for a position, or participate in the interview process, connect with us and describe the specific Accommodation requested for a disability-related limitation. Fill out an Accommodation request here: 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 youHaving interviews in an accessible locationBeing accompanied by a service dogHaving a sign language interpreter present for the interviewA 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.LinkedIn will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by LinkedIn, or (c) consistent with LinkedIn's legal duty to furnish information.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.Pay Transparency Policy Statement ​As a federal contractor, LinkedIn follows the Pay Transparency and non-discrimination provisions described at this link: 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: Full-timeFunction: EngineeringExperience level: DirectorIndustry: Internet