The teams that engineer LinkedIn’s features

Last week, you heard me chat with Chris Richman, Product Manager, with recent feature updates to LinkedIn's Communication system. This week, I had a chance to chat with our Director of Engineering for the Content Distribution Network (CDN) group, Ruslan Belkin. Hopefully, the interview will give you a better picture of the internal workings of our engineering teams, one of which Ruslan leads. So, check out the short 3:14 minutes conversation I had with Ruslan, followed by a quick summary.

If you haven't seen the video and don't plan on doing so, I thought I'll summarize some of the key areas Ruslan and I chatted about. Actually, here are the three topics we discussed:

1. What does Ruslan's team work on?

The CDN group is responsible for the following components of LinkedIn's communication system: member affiliation networks (connections and groups), invitations, the network updates and other feeds, the communication platform, contacts management and geography location search.
   
2. Product/Engineering collaboration:

Within the group we have a number of what we call Product/Engineering tracks: networks track, communication platform track, and the contacts management track. Each track has an engineering lead and a counterpart on the Product side with respective feature and infrastructure projects. Feature releases are typically every two weeks.

3. What's the engineering environment like?

Flexible: You will work in an agile development environment where results of your work will be visible to millions of LinkedIn users (currently there are more than 15 million LinkedIn users) very rapidly and this could be very rewarding for any engineer

Problem Solving: You will be faced with challenges of scale (huge data sets, stringent performance requirements, the need for high quality secure software to protect our customers) and will be exposed to innovative architectural solutions implemented on a large scale: asynchronous communication, caching, data replication.

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Have ideas, feedback, suggestions or questions? As you heard Ruslan say during the interview, the three best ways to reach us:

a. Contact the community guy; that'd be me. Email: msundar@linkedin.com
b. Either pose questions or answer questions on LinkedIn Answers. In particular, the "Using LinkedIn" category
c. Leave a comment at the end of this blog post