How are growth opportunities for a senior software engineer in the systems and infrastructure org at LinkedIn? Are there exciting new projects happening to provide ample opportunities for learning and growth? Do engineers get to own a significant chunk of functionality/feature to be able to make an impact? Are there any innovations happening ? How would one compare it against AWS? Assuming TC will remain same, are there better opportunities to grow and learn at AWS? Both the teams are in Bay Area.
Systems and Infrastructure isn’t an org. It’s an interview track. Engineers who pass the interview get allocated into different orgs such as Data Infra (Kafka, Samza, document stores, BLOB stores, derived data stores, graph, etc), APA (Data Warehousing, Hadoop, Spark, Data pipelines, Reporting apps), and Service Infra (Rest.li, dynamic discovery, service routing, load balancing, etc). Check out the Open Source tag on the Engineering blog to see if the projects interest you. Most of the work these teams do end up on open source. https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/
Thanks for the response. The teams I have talked to are mostly in the data infra area. I know that in general the products are good. I wanted to get more info with regards to how much new work might be happening in these teams. Are there enough opportunities to own sizable feature developments to grow as an engineer quickly? Are there still good problems to solve in general in these orgs. Are the teams fast moving and innovating? I know that specifics will depend on the individual team, but in general how are these things at a org level?
Ownership is a big deal so there is lots of ownership of features. However just like infra at other companies you have to set your expectations of maintenance vs new features. Work isn’t as fast as other teams like consumer because you’re basically responsible for keeping systems up and performant for all of the users inside and outside of the company (if you’re working on open source). The opportunity for career development is huge though because the chances for high visibility and cross functional work is much higher compared to other teams.