Staff Software Engineer - Network (SONiC)

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 hybrid in LinkedIn's Mountain View campus.

Team Description:

Our team is responsible for designing, implementing, and operating network software for data centers, inter-DC backbone and host networking stack that powers the LinkedIn economic graph. Our offering includes network operating system (SONiC), traffic engineering, intent-based configuration management, telemetry, and various systems helping with network packet forwarding and translation, monitoring, and operations.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will be a key technical leader and role model within the team. We are looking for someone who designs and develops technology to serve business and technology objectives, understands state-of-the-art networking research, aligns points of view across teams, and makes smart trade-offs. On top of the leadership skills, a successful Staff Software Engineer must exhibit strong technical skills both in software engineering and networking areas.

Responsibilities:

• You will provide technical leadership and drive the full lifecycle of network software development at LinkedIn—designing, developing, testing, operating, and continuously improving it to ensure scalability, high performance, and 24x7 reliability.

• You will produce high-quality software that is unit-tested, code-reviewed, and regularly checked in for continuous integration.

• You will collaborate closely with the network engineering and application teams to define the future direction of LinkedIn’s networking systems, leveraging state-of-the-art research in modern networking technologies and making informed trade-offs.

• You will elevate the level of craftsmanship by developing best practices and mentoring other engineers.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or related practical experience.

• 4+ years experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.

• 4+ years programming experience in object-oriented programming languages such as Golang, Python, Java, C++, Rust.

• Experience with network protocols such as TCP/IP, BGP, MPLS, RDMA, network overlay technologies, and network-based Quality of Service (QoS).

Preferred Qualifications:

• BS and 8+ years of relevant work experience, MS and 7+ years of relevant work experience, or PhD and 4+ years of relevant work experience.

• Experience in architecting, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems running in a 24x7 production environment.

• Experience or knowledge in networking programming, such as Software Defined Networking (SDN), intent-based configuration management, RDMA/RoCEv2, Segment Routing, and network congestion control algorithms.

• Experience or knowledge in SONiC Network Operating System, Kubernetes & CNI, host networking / TCP tuning.

• Experience or knowledge in network management, configuration generation and provisioning systems and tools. Ansible, REST/gRPC, NETCONF, Jenkins, Puppet, YANG, OpenConfig, etc.

Suggested Skills:

· Technical Leadership

· Architectural Mastery

· Code Review and Quality Assurance

· Advanced Security Practices

· Mentoring and Knowledge Sharing

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 $170,000 to $277,000. 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. Th