Senior Staff AI Engineer, AI Algorithm Foundations

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 Sunnyvale, CA.

Our Core AI organization is dedicated to transforming the professional world through innovative artificial intelligence solutions. We aim to enhance the experiences of over a billion members worldwide, enabling them to connect, learn, and grow in unprecedented ways. We develop next generation AI technologies that understand the unique needs of professionals and proactively assist them in achieving their goals.

Core AI is embarking on a groundbreaking initiative to develop agentic models that will redefine how our members interact with the LinkedIn platform. We are building advanced AI agents that exhibit reasoning, planning, and interaction capabilities. These agents will power new features and experiences that anticipate professionals' needs, automate complex tasks, and provide personalized guidance, ultimately shaping the future of work.

Responsibilities:

• This is a Senior Technical Leader role that will provide thought leadership and expert individual contribution for a team of Senior and Staff/Lead AI Engineers; reporting to the Director of the Foundational Algorithms (Core AI) team.
• Lead the development of next-generation recommender systems on top of foundational LLMs.
• Design and train large language models (LLMs) from scratch or adapt existing models to achieve state-of-the-art performance on recommendation tasks in Linkedin’s domain.
• Drive architectural decisions for foundational model development and deployment, ensuring scalability, efficiency, and robustness.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to a team of engineers, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams (product engineering, infrastructure) to identify high-impact opportunities and integrate models into the LinkedIn platform.
• Stay at the forefront of research in LLMs and related fields, contributing to the broader research community through publications and presentations.
• Define and execute rigorous evaluation strategies to benchmark the performance of foundational models against state-of-the-art solutions.

Qualifications Basic Qualifications:

• 2+ years as a Technical Lead, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or equivalent.
• 5+ years of industry experience in AI or Machine Learning Engineering.
• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline or equivalent practical experience

Preferred Qualifications:

• 10+ years of overall industry/research experience in AI and/or Machine Learning.
• PhD in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field Expert-level understanding of deep learning architectures, particularly Transformer models, and experience training and fine-tuning LLMs and applying them to recommender systems.
• Also, extensive experience developing models with advanced reasoning and planning capabilities.
• Strong programming skills in Python and relevant deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch).
• Significant contributions to the field of AI, demonstrated through publications in top-tier conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ACL) or impactful open-source projects.
• Proven ability to build models that accurately interpret and follow complex, nuanced instructions (zero-shot or few-shot).
• Also, experience developing models that can evaluate their own progress, identify errors, and adjust their approach accordingly.
• Strong understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques and their application to agent training in language-based environments.
• Experience with specific techniques for improving reasoning and planning in LLMs: e.g., program synthesis, symbolic reasoning, neuro-symbolic AI.

Suggested Skills:

• AI Modeling
• Reinforcement Learning (RL)
• Technical Leadership
• Large Language Models (LLMs)

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.

Compensation LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $241,000 - $326,000. Actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of labor considerations. The total compensation package for this position may also include annual performance bonus, stock, benefits and/or other applicable incentive compensation plans. For additional information, visit: https://careers.linkedin.com/benefits.

Additional Information 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.

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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.

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