Director, Software Engineering — Automation Platform & Apps

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.

The Director of Automation Platform & Apps is a senior leadership role within LinkedIn's Developer Productivity & Experience organization. This role leads the team responsible for building the platform and tooling that puts AI to work across LinkedIn's R&D ecosystem — both by deeply integrating industry AI agents with LinkedIn's internal systems, data, and developer workflows, and by providing the foundational platform on which all internally developed AI agents are built and operated. The team also develops LinkedIn-specific automation applications that drive productivity at scale across the company's R&D organization.

This is a high-impact, high-visibility role at the intersection of developer experience, AI tooling, and platform engineering — shaping how thousands of engineers at LinkedIn collaborate with AI every day.

Roles and Responsibilities:

• Define and own the strategy and roadmap for LinkedIn's Automation Platform — the foundational infrastructure that enables internal teams to build, deploy, and operate AI agents reliably and at scale.

• Drive the integration of industry AI agents with LinkedIn's engineering ecosystem, including internal developer tooling, data systems, APIs, and workflows, ensuring these agents are LinkedIn-aware and immediately productive.

• Lead the design and development of LinkedIn-specific automation applications that meaningfully accelerate developer productivity across the engineering organization.

• Partner broadly across engineering, product, and infrastructure teams to understand developer needs and translate them into platform capabilities that are self-service, scalable, and easy to adopt.

• Establish best practices, standards, and guardrails for how AI agents interact with LinkedIn's production systems, ensuring safety, reliability, and appropriate access controls.

• Act as a role model and coach for engineers and managers by setting clear expectations, providing candid feedback, and fostering accountability and growth.

• Collaborate with senior leadership to co-develop a long-term vision for AI-powered developer productivity aligned with LinkedIn's product and technology strategy.

• Develop and operationalize metrics and dashboards to measure platform adoption, developer productivity impact, and the effectiveness of automation initiatives.

• Serve as a domain expert by staying current on the rapidly evolving landscape of AI agents, developer tooling, and automation platforms, and applying those insights to LinkedIn's strategy.

• Hire, develop, and retain high-performing engineering leaders and engineers across a range of experience levels.

• Lead complex, cross-organizational initiatives by aligning stakeholders, managing risk, making informed tradeoffs, and delivering high-quality outcomes on time.

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications

• BA/BS degree in Computer Science or a related field

• 7+ years in engineering leadership, with experience leading platform or developer productivity focused teams

• 5+ years of experience building and operating large-scale developer platforms or internal tooling

• 4+ years of experience building software that meaningfully reduces developer toil and improves engineering velocity

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on development background in programming or scripting languages such as Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript.

• Experience building platforms or integrations with AI/ML systems, LLM-based agents, or developer automation tooling.

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams.

• The ability to balance business needs, a sense of urgency, conflicting constraints, a