Principal Staff Software Engineer, Systems 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. This role may be remote or hybrid. At LinkedIn, hybrid roles are performed both from home and from a LinkedIn office on select days, as determined by the business needs of the team. Remote roles are performed from the designated home work location upon time of hire, and any changes to this home work location requires a review of remote status and approval. LinkedIn’s Reliability Infrastructure team is responsible for defining and driving the reliability strategy, standards, and practices that keep LinkedIn’s most critical systems stable, resilient, and available at massive scale.As a Principal Staff Software Engineer, Reliability Infrastructure, you will serve as a senior technical authority for reliability across LinkedIn Engineering. You will help define how critical services are designed, built, operated, and measured, partnering broadly across infrastructure and product engineering teams to improve resiliency, reduce incidents, and raise the reliability bar across the company.A key focus of this role is driving the adoption and evolution of LinkedIn’s service criticality framework, including reliability expectations for the most business-critical systems. You will help classify services based on criticality and blast radius, define appropriate reliability standards, and influence system architecture to ensure the right levels of availability, redundancy, observability, and failure handling are in place.As AI-assisted software development, agent-based automation, and autonomous operational systems become more prevalent, this role will also help define how LinkedIn safely builds and operates reliable AI-enabled systems. You will shape standards for evaluating, deploying, monitoring, and governing AI-generated code and agentic workflows, ensuring that automation introduced into critical environments is observable, explainable, auditable, and designed with appropriate safeguards, rollback mechanisms, and human oversight.This is not a traditional SRE role focused on operating a single service or team. It is a company-wide technical leadership role for someone with deep distributed systems expertise, strong reliability judgment, and the ability to influence architecture and engineering practices across large organizations.ResponsibilitiesDefine and drive company-wide reliability strategy, standards, and best practices across LinkedIn EngineeringLead adoption and evolution of service criticality models that set reliability expectations based on business impact and blast radiusServe as a technical authority for architecture decisions related to reliability, resiliency, availability, and failure handlingPartner with infrastructure and product engineering teams to improve system design, reduce incident risk, and strengthen operational readinessIdentify high-risk systems and drive cross-organizational initiatives to improve reliability of critical servicesEstablish and evolve reliability standards including SLOs, SLIs, uptime expectations, redundancy, monitoring, alerting, and failover patternsInfluence engineering culture by promoting reliability-focused design, incident review rigor, and postmortem-driven improvementsProvide architectural guidance and mentorship to senior engineers and technical leaders across teamsBalance technical strategy, hands-on engineering judgment, and cross-functional influence to drive measurable improvements in site stabilityHelp shape how LinkedIn builds and operates resilient systems as the platform continues to scaleDrive the strategy for applying LLMs to alert triage, root cause analysis, and incident summarization at scale, ensuring systems are explainable, auditable, and safe to operate autonomously in Ring0/Ring1 environments.QualificationsBasic QualificationsBA/BS degree in Computer Science or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience10+ years of experience in software engineering, infrastructure engineering, distributed systems, SRE, production engineering, or reliability engineering5+ years of experience in a technical leadership, architect, or principal-level engineering roleExperience designing, building, or operating large-scale distributed systemsExperience defining or driving reliability standards such as SLOs, SLIs, uptime targets, incident reduction, or operational readiness frameworksUnderstanding of high availability, redundancy, fault tolerance, failure modes, and resiliency patternsExperience influencing architecture and engineering practices across multiple teams or organizationsSoftware engineering experience in one or more languages such as Java, Go, C++, Python, or similarPreferred QualificationsMS or PhD in Computer Science or related technical fieldExperience operating at company-wide or large org-wide scope as a reliability, infrastructure, SRE, or production engineering technical leaderExperience with tiered service criticality models, priority-based reliability frameworks, or large-scale reliability governanceDeep expertise in distributed systems reliability, service resilience, and failure isolation at scaleExperience with incident management, postmortems, operational reviews, and driving long-term corrective actions across organizationsExperience with observability, monitoring, alerting, capacity planning, disaster recovery, and multi-region failover strategiesBackground in mature SRE, production engineering, platform reliability, or infrastructure resilience environmentsExperience driving reliability transformations across large engineering organizationsExecutive-level communication skills with the ability to align technical decisions to business impactDemonstrated ability to influence technical direction without direct authority and drive adoption of standards across teamsPrior work on self-healing or auto-remediation systems at companies with large-scale infrastructure (hyperscalers, large internet companies).Experience defining reliability, safety, or governance standards for AI-enabled systems, agentic workflows, or AI-assisted software developmentFamiliarity with LLM and agent evaluation, production monitoring, guardrails, human oversight, and rollback strategies for autonomous systemsSuggested SkillsDistributed systems reliabilitySite Reliability Engineering / Production EngineeringHigh availability and fault toleranceSLO / SLI designIncident management and postmortem practicesObservability and monitoringResiliency engineeringAI agent reliability and safetyLLM and agent evaluationAI observability and monitoringAutonomous remediation and guardrailsLarge-scale infrastructureCross-organizational technical leadershipReliability standards and governanceFamiliarity with emerging standards and frameworks for agentic AI safety and evaluation (evals pipelines, red-teaming autonomous systems, policy guardrails for production agents).LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $226,000 to $369,000. 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 . Additional InformationEqual Opportunity Statement We seek candidates with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. 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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: SalesExperience level: DirectorIndustry: Internet