Principal AI Engineer, Search AI

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

Location:

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 California, Bellevue Washington, or New York City.

Team Mission:

As we enter the biggest transformation of work in our lifetime, the majority of jobs on this planet will change over the next few years. Figuring out how humans find their path and earn a living is the most important problem in the world right now—and that’s what we’re solving on LinkedIn Search. Our mission is to connect every professional to the right people, knowledge, and opportunities.

What This Role Is:

As a Principal AI Engineer on LinkedIn Search, you will serve as the technical architect behind our shift from semantic search to Agentic Search. You will lead the technical vision and execution for multi-step reasoning, autonomous execution, tool/API orchestration, and conversational search workflows that understand complex intent, synthesize insights, and proactively take action on behalf of members.

Working across ranking, infrastructure, and multiple partner teams, you will architect the AI systems that turn static search results into an adaptive and agent-driven intelligence engine for 1B+ members.

What You’ll Do:

• Design Agentic Systems: Design and scale multi-agent reasoning frameworks, tool-use protocols, and memory systems, optimized for real-time search workflows.

• Drive Evals & Safety: Build rigorous evaluation harnesses and guardrails for non-deterministic agent workflows, ensuring enterprise-grade trust, attribution, and safety at global scale.

• Rapid AI Prototyping: Build runnable, state-of-the-art agentic POCs to prove out new paradigms (multimodal search, proactive task execution, autonomous candidate/job matching) and push them directly to production.

• Mentor & Elevate: Set technical standards, engineering best practices, and architectural principles for AI/LLM deployment across the broader search organization.

Why We Are Here:

Behind every search executed by our AI agents, there’s a human getting one step closer to paying their mortgage, funding a small business, or finding their dream career. Your responsibility is to build the underlying intelligence that turns those searches into real-world outcomes.

Core Responsibilities:

As a Principal AI Engineer and senior-level member of technical staff, you will deliver a combination of strategic thought leadership, innovation, and execution. 

• Provide expert hands-on contribution

• Design multi-step reasoning frameworks, task planning systems, and tool-calling agents that solve complex operational or data challenges

• Define systems and standards for model evaluation, agent orchestration, and memory/context management 

• Implement rigorous safety guardrails, error handling, logging, evaluation mechanisms, and fallback strategies for production LLMs. 

• Serve as a Technical Leader, mentoring engineers and guiding complex technical decisions

Qualifications

Basic Qualifications:

• 7+ years of industry experience in software design, development, and algorithm related solutions.

• 5+ years in an Architect, Staff+, Principal, or equivalent technical leadership position

• Background in the following areas: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

• BS (or higher, e.g., MS, or PhD) in Computer Science or related technical field involving coding (e.g., physics or mathematics), or equivalent technical experience
   

Preferred Qualifications:

• 10+ years of overall experience including multiple years of high-level technical leadership, designing and implementing large-scale AI solutions related to ranking, retrieval, relevance, recommendations, personalization, and search. 

• Active participation in open-source projects related to search, recommendation, or NLP and/or contributions to conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ACL, or RecSys.

• Hands-on understanding of agentic AI loops — how a model decides to call a tool / agent, how a result re-enters context, how loops terminate, and where they fail.

• Able to decompose a problem from a first-principles perspective.

• Able to communicate with equal ease with both engineers, product, and senior leadership.
   

Suggested Skills:

• Large Language Models (LLMs)

• Agentic AI 

• AI Search & Recommendation Systems 

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.

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LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices.

The pay range for this role is $231,000 to $378,000. 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

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.

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 and describe the specific Accommodation requested for a disability-related limitation.
Fill out an Accommodation request here: https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/b660a0327d044969abfd7a4e73d15c36

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.

San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance ​

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, LinkedIn will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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 and Compliance Posters for Job Candidates 

Please use this link to access documents that provide information about how LinkedIn handles the personal data of employees and job applicants, as well as the E-Verify Participation Notice and the Department of Justice Immigrant and Employee Rights Section Right to Work posters: https://www.linkedin.com/legal/candidate-portal.