Staff Software Engineer - Trust & Safety

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. 

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 hybrid in LinkedIn's Mountain View campus.

LinkedIn is home to the world’s largest professional community, and keeping it safe requires world-class defense. The Trust Incident Management team leads LinkedIn’s response to fraud, abuse, and emerging threats, combining engineering excellence with rapid incident response to protect our members at scale. We build and operate the systems that detect, mitigate, and prevent sophisticated attacks in real time. Our work is fast-paced, technically challenging, and directly impacts the trust and safety of over a billion professionals worldwide. 

What You’ll Work On 

• Adversarial engineering at scale. Bad actors evolve daily. You’ll design and ship defenses that stay ahead of sophisticated, coordinated attacks targeting a billion-member platform. 

• High-signal, high-stakes detection. Build systems that separate real threats from noise in real time, with immediate impact on member safety. 

• Novel abuse patterns. From credential theft to coordinated inauthentic behavior, you’ll tackle problems that don’t have playbooks yet. 

• Cross-functional collaboration. Work alongside data scientists, investigators, and platform engineers to dismantle threat actor operations end-to-end. 

Responsibilities 

• Orchestrate the response to large-scale, sophisticated attacks, defining investigation directions, coordinating workstreams across teams, and holding the broader team accountable for timely resolution. 

• Design and build scalable detection and mitigation systems that operate 24x7, improving techniques that surface new or unknown threats with reliable precision, recall, and speed. Deliver production-quality code that is well-tested, peer-reviewed, and continuously integrated. 

• Create and champion analytical research approaches, threat modeling workflows, and automation that can be adopted across teams to strengthen defense posture. 

• Drive cross-team consensus on defense trade-offs, using data to navigate competing concerns such as product growth impact, false positive rates, and defense coverage gaps, across engineering, data science, policy, and legal stakeholders. Balance immediate incident response with long-term defense strategy, accounting for how mitigation decisions affect attacker behavior over time. 

• Serve as incident commander for complex attacks, maintaining investigation quality under pressure and creating efficiencies in intake, escalation, and risk communication. 

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship, guiding the team on technology choices, process decisions, and engineering best practices while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. 

Basic Qualifications 

• BA/BS Degree in Computer Science or related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience. 

• 4+ years of experience in software design, development, and algorithmic problem-solving. 

• 4+ years of programming experience in a major programming language (e.g., Python, Java, C++, TypeScript, Swift), with proficiency in SQL. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• BS and 8+ years of relevant work experience, MS and 7+ years of relevant work experience, or PhD and 4+ years of relevant work experience. 

• Demonstrated technical leadership, including mentoring engineers and driving architectural decisions across teams. 

• Domain experience in Trust & Safety, Anti-Abuse, Cybersecurity, or Cybercrime. Familiarity with adversarial systems, threat modeling, or abuse detection patterns. 

• Programming experience with Python, Java or Scala, and SQL in large-scale data environments. 

• Experience designing and building large-scale distributed infrastructure and services. 

• Track record of analyzing complex data to identify outliers, malicious behavior, or emerging threat patterns. 

• Foundation in AI/ML or Data Science, with experience applying these disciplines to detection, classification, or anomaly identification in adversarial contexts. 

• Experience with big data and streaming data technologies. 

Suggested Skills 

• Technical Leadership 

• Detection and Defense Systems Design 

• Threat Analysis and Incident Response 

• Data-Driven Investigation 

• Cross-Functional Collaboration 

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.

LinkedIn is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. The pay range for this role is $152,000 - $248,000. 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. 

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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• Documents in alternate formats or read aloud to you
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• Being accompanied by a service dog
• Having a sign language interpreter present for the interview

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