Staff Engineer, Data Center

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.

Job Description

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.

This role will be based in Mountain View, CA, Hillsboro, OR, Richardson, TX, Plano, TX or Manassas, VA.

The Data Center Engineering (DCE) team designs, builds, and maintains the physical facilities and infrastructure that support critical IT systems, applications, and data. Data Center Engineers ensure the stability, reliability, safety, and security of data center operations to meet stringent uptime and performance targets. They lead the design, construction, commissioning, and lifecycle maintenance of physical infrastructure, drive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) investigations, implement corrective actions and collaborate with colocation providers while enforcing safety codes, industry standards, and best practices.

Mechanical and Electrical (M&E) Engineers within the DCE team apply deep electrical and mechanical engineering expertise to design, construct, and maintain data center facilities, ensuring optimal efficiency and resilience across power and cooling systems.

Responsibilities include:

• Lead technical evaluation of data center engineering documents, expansions, and data hall fit-outs, including review of electrical one-line diagrams, mechanical system designs, and infrastructure layouts. Partner with DC providers to measure and enforce lease SLAs, assess power and cooling capacity, and ensure compliance with LinkedIn’s redundancy, resiliency, and availability standards.
• Develop and maintain system-level resiliency and redundancy models that define load distribution, failover sequences, and power/cooling interdependencies to ensure infrastructure designs meet LinkedIn’s Tier-level and N+X performance criteria.
• Support design and construction of new data centers, expansions, and retrofits., ensuring that electrical and mechanical systems meet design intent, testing protocols, commissioning standards, and overall project delivery timelines.
• Contribute to LinkedIn’s liquid-cooling deployment strategy, assessing various direct-to-chip cooling technologies, comparing performance tradeoffs and operational impacts, and providing data-driven recommendations to leadership for scalable implementation. Create appropriate metrics and tools to support monitoring and maintenance. 
• Perform and review advanced electrical and mechanical calculations and analysis, including load flow, short-circuit, coordination, arc-flash, and thermal modeling, to validate system performance and capacity under normal and failure conditions.
• Lead data center design standardization efforts, including development, maintenance, and continuous improvement of the global Basis of Design (BOD) documentation. Define and update owner’s requirements, design drawings, technical specifications, bill of materials, and performance benchmarks to ensure consistency across regions and providers. 
• Lead and oversee commissioning and Integrated Systems Testing (IST) of new data center spaces, retrofits, and upgrades, verifying end-to-end system performance against design specifications and operational requirements.
• Evaluate, qualify, and approve new electrical and mechanical systems, equipment, and components, including vendor qualification and product testing, to ensure standardization, performance, and long-term reliability across the global data center fleet.
• Develop and manage a comprehensive preventive and corrective maintenance program in collaboration with data center providers, facility operators, and internal operations teams. 
• Lead technical investigations and root cause analyses (RCA) for electrical and mechanical incidents, driving corrective actions, design improvements, and global best practices. 
• Maintain and govern as-built documentation and technical records, ensuring drawings, submittals, test reports, and configuration data are accurate, version-controlled, and accessible to engineering, capacity planning, and operations teams. 
• Review and assess maintenance notifications, Methods of P