Principal Staff Software Engineer, Service Infrastructure

This role will be based in Sunnyvale or San Francisco.

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.

 

Team Description

At LinkedIn, the Service Infrastructure (SI) organization provides the foundation for all online services to run reliably, efficiently, and at scale. We power core technologies that enable every product team at LinkedIn to build, deploy, and operate their services seamlessly.

gRPC is at the heart of LinkedIn’s inter-service communication, connecting thousands of services across multiple programming languages. Our mission is to define and drive the future of gRPC at LinkedIn, evolving the infrastructure to improve reliability, performance, developer experience, and scalability while reducing complexity and operational cost.

As a Principal Staff Engineer in Service Infrastructure, you will be the primary domain expert for gRPC and play a critical role in shaping the long-term direction of inter-service communication at LinkedIn. You will lead foundational projects, set technical strategy, and provide thought leadership that impacts every service and developer at LinkedIn.

 

Responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical direction for gRPC at LinkedIn, balancing scalability, reliability, developer experience, and efficiency.
• Lead large-scale gRPC infrastructure initiatives, including evolution from bridged to native gRPC, support for multiple programming languages, and alignment with LinkedIn’s platform vision.
• Provide architectural leadership across the engineering organization, setting the bar for performance, resiliency, and security in LinkedIn’s RPC stack.
• Partner with other senior engineers and managers to drive cross-functional alignment on gRPC strategy and execution.
• Influence how gRPC integrates with the broader service platform, including dependency management, observability, configuration, and deployment.
• Act as a mentor and technical leader, raising the bar for craftsmanship and guiding engineers across multiple teams.
• Represent LinkedIn externally as an industry thought leader, sharing best practices and innovations in large-scale RPC systems.
• Establish a culture of innovation, quality, and operational excellence, ensuring that design and architectural choices optimize for developer productivity and business impact.
• Anticipate future needs in scale and efficiency, and proactively identify infrastructure gaps and solutions.
   

Basic Qualifications:

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of industry experience in software design, distributed systems, or infrastructure engineering.
• 7+ years of experience in programming languages such as Java, Go, C++, Python, or Rust.
• 5+ years in an architect or technical leadership role.
• Experience with distributed systems, networking, or inter-service communication protocols (e.g., gRPC, HTTP/2, RPC frameworks).

 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building and operating large-scale, high-performance infrastructure serving millions of requests per second.
• Expertise in gRPC or equivalent RPC/communication technologies at scale.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems concepts: reliability, fault tolerance, scalability, and performance optimization.
• Experience influencing company-wide technical direction and aligning diverse teams toward a common strategy.
• Demonstrated ability to simplify complex infrastructure problems into developer-friendly solutions.
• Excellent communication skills, with a track record of influencing senior leaders and external communities.
• Experience mentoring engineers and cultivating a strong engineering culture.

 

Suggest Skills

• Distributed systems
• Service Infrastructure
• gRPC or equivalent RPC
• Developing technology strategies at a company-wide scale.
• Technical leadership

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 $218,000 to $357,000. 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
• Having interviews in an accessible location
• Being accompanied by a service dog
• Having a sign language interpreter present for the interview

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