Staff Engineer - Commodity Manager

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.

We are looking for a Commodity Manager / NPI lead to drive sourcing strategy, cost management, and supply assurance for our datacenter hardware portfolio. This role ensures we have secure, scalable, and cost-efficient access to critical components for new products that support LinkedIn's rapidly growing global compute footprint. In this role, you will collaborate closely with engineering, Capacity planning, finance and our global commodity vendor ecosystem to deliver cost effective and reliable infrastructure at scale.

Responsibilities:

• Commodity strategy and market intelligence - Develop and own the strategy across CPU, GPU, DRAM, NAND, HDD etc. Monitor market trends, silicon transitions, pricing cycles, supply health and technology roadmaps. Provide insights to inform LRP and annual hardware budget decisions.
• Supplier and Vendor Management - Manage day-to-day and strategic relationships with suppliers across silicon and component vendors. Lead QBRs, roadmap alignment sessions and performance scorecards. Drive escalations to resolve supply, quality or commercials.
• Supply Assurance and Allocations - Secure quarterly and annual supply allocations with commodity vendors, partner with supply planning to ensure accuracy in consumption and forecast to prevent shortages. Mitigate risk for long lead time items, partnering with engineering on SKU selection.
• Cost and Commercial Ownership - Lead negotiations including pricing, LTAs, volume discounts, rebates. Develop cost models to influence engineering decisions and identify cost optimizations through multi vendor strategies and roadmap optimization.
• Quality reliability and lifecycle management - Oversee product qualification in partnership with Hardware engineering to influence architecture decisions and vendor selection. Drive quality improvements, RMA terms, AFR metrics and supplier corrective actions. Drive decisions on EOL transitions, component refresh cycle, and adoption of new technology.
• Cross functional leadership - Work closely with engineering to influence hardware architecture decisions and vendor selection. Partner with capacity planning, supply planning and DC operations to understand deployment needs / timelines. Collaborate with finance on cost forecast and CapEx modeling.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain Management, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or related field
• 10+ years of experience in commodity management, vendor management and hardware sourcing or supply chain for datacenter/enterprise. 
• Experience managing silicon, memory and storage components 
• Experience with silicon lifecycles, DRAM/NAND market dynamics and datacenter hardware architecture. 
• Proven negotiation experience and ability to manage executive level relationships.  
• Experience leading complex technical programs in compute, storage, or networking hardware
• Experience with analytical skills with ability to model cost, supply and risk tradeoffs. 
• Experience working with suppliers, contract manufacturers, and global production teams

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in an engineering discipline
• Experience with hyperscale infrastructure or data center environments
• Demonstrated ability to work closely with C-level executives, particularly for commodities to ensure alignment on NPI roadmaps and best in class pricing/availability
• Familiarity with ERP solutions and hardware PLM tools
• Demonstrated ability to influence decision-making across engineering, operations, and sourcing
• Experience with infrastructure supply ecosystem and risk mitigation strategies

Suggested Skills:

• Systems Thinking
• Cross-functional C