Sr. Staff Software Engineer, AI Platform

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network, built to help members of all backgrounds and experiences achieve more in their careers. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Every day our members use our products to make connections, discover opportunities, build skills and gain insights. We believe amazing things happen when we work together in an environment where everyone feels a true sense of belonging, and that what matters most in a candidate is having the skills needed to succeed. It inspires us to invest in our talent and support career growth. Join us to challenge yourself with work that matters.
At LinkedIn, we trust each other to do our best work where it works best for us and our teams. This role offers hybrid work options, meaning you can work from home and commute to a LinkedIn office, depending on what’s best for you and when your team needs to be together.
This role can be based in Mountain View, CA, or Bellevue, WA.
Join us to push the boundaries of scaling large models together. The team is responsible for scaling LinkedIn’s AI model training, feature engineering and serving with hundreds of billions of parameters models and large scale feature engineering infra for all AI use cases from recommendation models, large language models, to computer vision models. We optimize performance across algorithms, AI frameworks, data infra, compute software, and hardware to harness the power of our GPU fleet with thousands of latest GPU cards. The team also works closely with the open source community and has many open source committers (TensorFlow, Horovod, Ray, vLLM, Hugginface, DeepSpeed etc.) in the team. Additionally, this team focussed on technologies like LLMs, GNNs, Incremental Learning, Online Learning and Serving performance optimizations across billions of user queries.
Model Training Infrastructure: As an engineer on the AI Training Infra team, you will play a crucial role in building the next-gen training infrastructure to power AI use cases. You will design and implement high performance data I/O, work with open source teams to identify and resolve issues in popular libraries like Huggingface, Horovod and PyTorch, enable distributed training over 100s of billions of parameter models, debug and optimize deep learning training, and provide advanced support for internal AI teams in areas like model parallelism, tensor parallelism, Zero++ etc. Finally, you will assist in and guide the development of containerized pipeline orchestration infrastructure, including developing and distributing stable base container images, providing advanced profiling and observability, and updating internally maintained versions of deep learning frameworks and their companion libraries like Tensorflow, PyTorch, DeepSpeed, GNNs, Flash Attention. PyTorch Lightning and more and more.
Feature Engineering: this team shapes the future of AI with the state-of-the-art Feature Platform, which empowers AI Users to effortlessly create, compute, store, consume, monitor, and govern features within online, offline, and nearline environments, optimizing the process for model training and serving. As an engineer in the team, you will explore and innovate within the online, offline, and nearline spaces at scale (millions of QPS, multi terabytes of data, etc), developing and refining the infrastructure necessary to transform raw data into valuable feature insights. Utilizing leading open-source technologies like Spark, Beam, and Flink and more, you will play a crucial role in processing and structuring feature data, ensuring its most optimal storage in the Feature Store, and serving feature data with high performance.
Model Serving Infrastructure: this team builds low latency high performance applications serving very large & complex models across LLM and Personalization models. As an engineer, you will build compute efficient infra on top of native cloud, enable GPU based inference for a large variety of use cases, cuda level optimizations for high performance, enable on-device and online training. Challenges include scale (10s of thousands of QPS, multiple terabytes of data, billions of model parameters), agility (experiment with hundreds of new ML models per quarter using thousands of features), and enabling GPU inference at scale.
ML Ops: The MLOps and Experimentation team is responsible for the infrastructure that runs MLOps and experimentation systems across LinkedIn. From Ramping to Observability, this org powers the AI products that define LinkedIn. This team, inside MLOps, is responsible for AI Metadata, Observability, Orchestration, Ramping and Experimentation for all models; building tools that enable our product and infrastructure engineers to optimize their models and deliver the best performance possible.
As a Sr. Staff Software Engineer, you will have first-hand opportunities to advance one of the most scalable AI platforms in the world. At the same time, you will work together with our talented teams of researchers and engineers to build your career and your personal brand in the AI industry.
Responsibilities
-Owning the technical strategy for broad or complex requirements with insightful and forward-looking approaches that go beyond the direct team and solve large open-ended problems.
-Designing, implementing, and optimizing the performance of large-scale distributed serving or training for personalized recommendation as well as large language models.
-Improving the observability and understandability of various systems with a focus on improving developer productivity and system sustenance.
-Mentoring other engineers, defining our challenging technical culture, and helping to build a fast-growing team.
-Working closely with the open-source community to participate and influence cutting edge open-source projects (e.g., vLLMs, PyTorch, GNNs, DeepSpeed, Huggingface, etc.).
-Functioning as the tech-lead for several concurrent key initiatives AI Infrastructure and defining the future of AI Platforms.
Basic Qualifications:
- BS/BA in Computer Science or related technical field or equivalent technical experience
- 5+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions
- 5+ years of experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Python, C++, Java, Go, Rust, Scala
- 2+ years of experience as an architect, or technical leadership position
- 5+ years of experience in the industry with leading / building deep learning systems
- Hands-on experience developing distributed systems or other large-scale systems
Preferred Qualifications:
- MS or PhD in Computer Science or related technical discipline.
- 10+ years of experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions with at least 5 years of experience in a technical leadership position
- 10+ years of experience in an object-oriented programming language such as Python, C++, Java, Go, Rust, Scala
- 5+ years of experience with large-scale distributed systems and client-server architectures
-Experience building ML applications, LLM serving, GPU serving.
- Co-author or maintainer of any open-source projects
- Expertise in machine learning infrastructure, including technologies like MLFlow, Kubeflow and large scale distributed systems
- Expertise in deep learning frameworks and tensor libraries like PyTorch, Tensorflow, JAX/FLAX
Suggested Skills:
-ML Algorithm Development
-Machine Learning and Deep Learning
-Information retrieval / recommendation systems
-Technical leadership
LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.
The pay range for this role is $180,000 to $300,000. 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 Opportunity Statement
LinkedIn is committed to diversity in its workforce and is 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 an Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Employer as described in our equal opportunity statement here: Please reference and for more information.
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