Principal Staff Software Engineer - Data Lake Infrastructure

Description

This role will be based in Mountain View or Bellevue.

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 Data Lake Infrastructure team builds and operates the foundational storage and table-management technologies powering LinkedIn's data platform at massive scale. We own OpenHouse, LinkedIn's open-source control plane for Apache Iceberg tables, along with the broader data lake stack (storage engines, table formats, metadata/catalog services, and compaction/retention systems) that serves thousands of internal teams, petabyte-scale datasets, and mission-critical analytics, ML, and AI workloads. We collaborate closely with open-source communities (Apache Iceberg, Trino, Spark) and partner teams across Data Infrastructure, Analytics, and AI Platform to ensure reliable, cost-efficient, and governable data access company-wide.

We are seeking a Principal Technical Lead to drive the technical vision and execution for OpenHouse and LinkedIn's data lake technologies. You will set architectural direction, lead complex cross-team initiatives, and mentor engineers building the next generation of table-management and lakehouse infrastructure. This role combines deep hands-on engineering with technical leadership — you'll design for scale, reliability, and openness while representing LinkedIn in the broader open-source data lake ecosystem.

Come join our infrastructure teams and share the knowledge with a broader community while making a real impact within our company.

Core Responsibilities:

Own the technical roadmap and architecture for OpenHouse and core data lake services (catalog, table format, compaction, retention, replication, governance).

Lead design and implementation of large-scale, highly available distributed systems handling petabyte-scale Iceberg tables.

Drive open-source contributions and engagement with Apache Iceberg and related ecosystem projects.

Partner with Analytics, AI Platform, and Data Infra teams to align on requirements, integration points, and long-term platform strategy.

Provide technical mentorship and code/design review leadership across the team; raise the engineering bar.

Evaluate and adopt emerging lakehouse technologies, driving build-vs-adopt decisions.

Ensure system reliability, performance, and cost efficiency through sound SLOs, monitoring, and capacity planning.

Lead technical design reviews, write RFCs/design docs, and drive consensus across stakeholders.

Guide incident response and root-cause analysis for critical data lake infrastructure issues.

Guide incident response and root-cause analysis for critical data lake infrastructure issues.

Responsibilities

• 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 $231,000 to $378,000. 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.
• Additional Information

Requirements

• Basic Qualifications
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent.
• 10+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.
• 10+ years of experience in technical leadership: architecture ownership, mentoring, cross-team influence.
• 8+ years of experience in table formats (Iceberg/Delta/Hudi), data lake/lakehouse architectures, and query engines (Spark, Trino, Presto).
• 8+ years building large-scale distributed data systems (storage, databases, data lakes, or data infrastructure)
• 10+ years of experience in systems programming (Java/Scala/Go) and understanding of distributed systems fundamentals (consistency, replication, metadata management.
• 8+ years of experience with Open-source contribution experience preferred, especially in Apache Iceberg or similar projects.
• Preferred Qualifications
• MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field.
• Experience in architecting, building, and running large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with communication and ability to influence cross-functional teams.
• Background in industry thought leadership.
• Demonstrated ability to align technical decisions with business outcomes and drive customer-centric innovation.
• Production experience operating Iceberg (or similar table format) infrastructure at multi-petabyte, multi-tenant scale.
• Open-source contribution experience strongly preferred, especially in Apache Iceberg, Trino, Spark, or related lakehouse/OSS projects, or similar projects.
• Experience with catalog/metadata services, compaction, retention, and data governance.
• Background in storage cost optimization (tiering, compaction, format evolution).
• Track record leading cross-org technical initiatives as a technical lead or architect.
• Suggested Skills:
• Distributed Systems
• Data Infrastructure
• Data Lake, Apache Iceberg, Trino, Spark
• Deep understanding of concurrency, distributed algorithms, and data structures.
• Large scale technical leadership
• Additional Information:

Conditions

As a federal contractor, LinkedIn follows the Pay Transparency and non-discrimination provisions described at this link: https://lnkd.in/paytransparency.

Company 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.