Senior Staff Engineer, Linux Kernel

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 may be located in Mountain View, CA or Bellevue, WA.

LinkedIn operates thousands of microservices generating hundreds of thousands of queries per second across multiple global data centers, forming the foundation that powers our rapidly growing Consumer and Enterprise businesses.

As a Senior Staff Linux OS Engineer, you will play a key role within LinkedIn Physical Infrastructure, helping define and drive LinkedIn’s long-term strategy for the future of the Linux operating system and kernel. In this role, you will develop, maintain, and troubleshoot LinkedIn’s custom Linux kernel and operating system images that support large-scale production environments.

You will work closely with engineering teams across LinkedIn and Microsoft to ensure our infrastructure remains performant, secure, and resilient. This role will lead efforts to modernize Linux across LinkedIn by adopting and integrating advanced kernel capabilities—such as eBPF-based observability, I/O optimization, and TCP performance tuning—while shaping a strategy that increases platform flexibility without compromising safety or security.

Beyond technical leadership, you will foster LinkedIn’s culture and values by driving collaboration, building strong cross-functional relationships, and mentoring engineers across teams.

Responsibilities: 

• Ownership for Linux kernel builds, maintenance and troubleshooting
• Interaction/Collaboration within the Linux community at large, as well as with the Microsoft Linux team.
• Develop Road map and Pipelines for Custom Kernel Images for Linkedin Applications by working with Development/SRE Teams (Espresso/Kafka/Liquid/Search/AI and ML)
• Influence adoption of Modernized Kernel within Linkedin along with educating and influencing application development to adopt new capabilities within the kernel for extensive workload applications
• Collaborate with Other Senior Engineering IC’s to optimize tuning for Application performance from the Kernel perspective. Identify what Kernel instrumentation would help with tuning and forensics. 
• Act as a domain expert to Influence technology decisions
• Work with Security to monitor and identify Kernel bugs/vulnerabilities and come up with fixes and deployment solutions.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science OR related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years’ experience in software design, development
• 5+ years of experience in an architect or leadership position
• 5+ years of experience working as a Kernel Developer/Maintainer for Small to Large Scale Organization

Preferred Qualifications: 

• BS and 10+ years of relevant work experience, MS and 8+ years of relevant work experience, or PhD and 6+ years of relevant work experience.
• 7+ years of experience working in Open Source Software 
• 5+ Experience in Developing Security/Bug Fixes for Kernel 
• 5+ Cloud/Virtualization/Container Experience 
• Recognized expert/specialist by the Linux Kernel community

Suggested Skills:

• Technical Leadership
• Linux Kernel
• Open Source

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 $181,000 to $297,000. 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.

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