Principal Staff Software Engineer - Data Infrastructure & Data Quality
Software Engineering, Other Engineering, Data Science, Quality Assurance
Mountain View, CA, USA · United States
USD 207k-340k / year + Equity
Posted on Apr 28, 2025
LinkedIn was built to help professionals achieve more in their careers, and every day, millions of people use our products to connect, discover opportunities, and gain insights. Our global reach allows us to make a direct impact on the world’s workforce in ways no other company can. We’re much more than a digital resume—we transform lives through innovative products and technology.
Searching for your next big opportunity? At LinkedIn, we strive to help our employees find passion and purpose. Join us in changing the way the world works.
We believe that leadership is about fostering growth, maintaining balance, and achieving results. Our leaders value their craft, inspire their teams, and set the standard for high-quality work. They drive the strategy and implementation of critical initiatives, motivating and developing their teams to make a lasting impact on our business and community.
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.
Help shape the future of how we discover, trust, and manage data.
We’re looking for a visionary and deeply technical Principal Staff Engineer to join our Data Management organization and lead the charge in building world-class solutions for data discovery, observability, and quality. This is a pivotal role for a senior technologist who thrives at the intersection of data infrastructure, distributed systems, and metadata intelligence.
If you've built large-scale data platforms, contributed to data catalogs or semantic search engines, and care deeply about making data reliable and discoverable—this is your opportunity to lead that transformation at scale
Responsibilities:
Architectural Leadership:
-Define and evolve the long-term technical vision for data discovery and data quality across the organization.
-Design and lead implementation of scalable, low-latency systems for metadata, data quality signals, and observability.
-Evaluate new architectures, tools, and frameworks—and lead their adoption across the platform.
-Set engineering standards, guide system design reviews, and mentor other engineers.
Data Platform, Metadata and Data Discovery Expertise
-Architect systems that unify structured and unstructured metadata to make data assets easier to find, understand, and trust.
-Develop mechanisms to automatically assess data freshness, completeness, and reliability across the data lifecycle.
-Deep expertise in one or more of data platforms, data quality, data catalogs, data discovery.
Operational Excellence:
-Drive improvements in system observability, monitoring, and alerting.
-Lead efforts to improve system reliability, availability, and maintainability.
-Participate in incident response and root cause analysis.
-Champion best practices for software development, testing, and deployment.
Collaboration and Communication:
-Effectively communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
-Collaborate with cross-functional teams, 1 including product, operations, and data science
Basic Qualifications:
BS/BA in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent technical experience
10+ years of experience in software design, building solutions
5+ years in a technical leadership position
Preferred Qualifications:
12+ years of experience in software design
5+ of those years in a technical leadership position
Experience with data platforms, data discovery, data quality and data observability.
Experience leading and influencing within large, matrixed organization
Experience leading high-impact, cross-organization initiatives.
Suggested skills
- Data Platforms and Data Discovery
- Data Quality and Data Observability.
- Developing technology strategies at a company-wide scale.
- Technical leadership
LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.
The pay range for this role is $207,000 to $340,000. 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.
The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For more information, visit https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits
Equal Opportunity Statement
We seek candidates with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. LinkedIn considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
LinkedIn is committed to offering an inclusive and accessible experience for all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. Our goal is to foster an inclusive and accessible workplace where everyone has the opportunity to be successful.
If you need a reasonable accommodation to search for a job opening, apply for a position, or participate in the interview process, connect with us at accommodations@linkedin.com and describe the specific accommodation requested for a disability-related limitation.
Reasonable accommodations are modifications or adjustments to the application or hiring process that would enable you to fully participate in that process. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to:
-Documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you
-Having interviews in an accessible location
-Being accompanied by a service dog
-Having a sign language interpreter present for the interview
A request for an accommodation will be responded to within three business days. However, non-disability related requests, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.
LinkedIn will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by LinkedIn, or (c) consistent with LinkedIn's legal duty to furnish information.
Pay Transparency Policy Statement
As a federal contractor, LinkedIn follows the Pay Transparency and non-discrimination provisions described at this link: https://lnkd.in/paytransparency.
Global Data Privacy Notice for Job Candidates
This document provides transparency around the way in which LinkedIn handles personal data of employees and job applicants: https://lnkd.in/GlobalDataPrivacyNotice
Searching for your next big opportunity? At LinkedIn, we strive to help our employees find passion and purpose. Join us in changing the way the world works.
We believe that leadership is about fostering growth, maintaining balance, and achieving results. Our leaders value their craft, inspire their teams, and set the standard for high-quality work. They drive the strategy and implementation of critical initiatives, motivating and developing their teams to make a lasting impact on our business and community.
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.
Help shape the future of how we discover, trust, and manage data.
We’re looking for a visionary and deeply technical Principal Staff Engineer to join our Data Management organization and lead the charge in building world-class solutions for data discovery, observability, and quality. This is a pivotal role for a senior technologist who thrives at the intersection of data infrastructure, distributed systems, and metadata intelligence.
If you've built large-scale data platforms, contributed to data catalogs or semantic search engines, and care deeply about making data reliable and discoverable—this is your opportunity to lead that transformation at scale
Responsibilities:
Architectural Leadership:
-Define and evolve the long-term technical vision for data discovery and data quality across the organization.
-Design and lead implementation of scalable, low-latency systems for metadata, data quality signals, and observability.
-Evaluate new architectures, tools, and frameworks—and lead their adoption across the platform.
-Set engineering standards, guide system design reviews, and mentor other engineers.
Data Platform, Metadata and Data Discovery Expertise
-Architect systems that unify structured and unstructured metadata to make data assets easier to find, understand, and trust.
-Develop mechanisms to automatically assess data freshness, completeness, and reliability across the data lifecycle.
-Deep expertise in one or more of data platforms, data quality, data catalogs, data discovery.
Operational Excellence:
-Drive improvements in system observability, monitoring, and alerting.
-Lead efforts to improve system reliability, availability, and maintainability.
-Participate in incident response and root cause analysis.
-Champion best practices for software development, testing, and deployment.
Collaboration and Communication:
-Effectively communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
-Collaborate with cross-functional teams, 1 including product, operations, and data science
Basic Qualifications:
BS/BA in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent technical experience
10+ years of experience in software design, building solutions
5+ years in a technical leadership position
Preferred Qualifications:
12+ years of experience in software design
5+ of those years in a technical leadership position
Experience with data platforms, data discovery, data quality and data observability.
Experience leading and influencing within large, matrixed organization
Experience leading high-impact, cross-organization initiatives.
Suggested skills
- Data Platforms and Data Discovery
- Data Quality and Data Observability.
- Developing technology strategies at a company-wide scale.
- Technical leadership
LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.
The pay range for this role is $207,000 to $340,000. 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.
The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For more information, visit https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits
Equal Opportunity Statement
We seek candidates with a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. LinkedIn considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.
LinkedIn is committed to offering an inclusive and accessible experience for all job seekers, including individuals with disabilities. Our goal is to foster an inclusive and accessible workplace where everyone has the opportunity to be successful.
If you need a reasonable accommodation to search for a job opening, apply for a position, or participate in the interview process, connect with us at accommodations@linkedin.com and describe the specific accommodation requested for a disability-related limitation.
Reasonable accommodations are modifications or adjustments to the application or hiring process that would enable you to fully participate in that process. Examples of reasonable accommodations include but are not limited to:
-Documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you
-Having interviews in an accessible location
-Being accompanied by a service dog
-Having a sign language interpreter present for the interview
A request for an accommodation will be responded to within three business days. However, non-disability related requests, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.
LinkedIn will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by LinkedIn, or (c) consistent with LinkedIn's legal duty to furnish information.
Pay Transparency Policy Statement
As a federal contractor, LinkedIn follows the Pay Transparency and non-discrimination provisions described at this link: https://lnkd.in/paytransparency.
Global Data Privacy Notice for Job Candidates
This document provides transparency around the way in which LinkedIn handles personal data of employees and job applicants: https://lnkd.in/GlobalDataPrivacyNotice