LinkedIn provides a technical onboarding program to teach new hires about how LinkedIn builds and operates applications and services. The summary covers the key learning outcomes around LinkedIn's architecture, development process, systems that power the platform, and core values. It also introduces some of the leadership team and major organizational groups within R&D like Product and Engineering.

2. LinkedIn Tech Foundations
Technical Learning and Development Team

3. Learning Outcomes
How we architect apps and services
How we build insanely great products
How code gets from development to production
What systems power LinkedIn and keep them stable
Where to get the information and data you need

4. LinkedIn’s Core Values
Our members come first
Relationships matter
Be open, honest, and constructive
Demand excellence
Take intelligent risks
Act like an owner
go/values

5. The leadership team
Reid Hoffman
Executive Chairman
& Co-Founder
Jeff Weiner
CEO
Nick Besbeas
VP
Marketing
Mike Gamson
SVP
Global Solutions
Jeff Weiner
Interim Leader
Product & UX
Kevin Scott
SVP
Engineering
Steve Sordello
SVP & CFO
Shannon Stubo
VP
Corporate Comm
Pat Wadors
VP
Talent Org
Mike Callahan
General Counsel
& Secretary

6. The R&D Organization at LinkedIn

7. Product
OperationsProduct Development

8. Product Development
ProductOperations
Development
Engineering
Operations
Product Management
User Experience
Web Dev
Data Science
go/product-teams

9. Product
OperationsProduct Development

10. Operations
Product
ations
Product Development
NOC
SRE
DBA
SysOps
NetOps
Security

11. Product Development

12. LinkedIn’s new experience
methodology designed to be simple,
unified, delightful, and actionable.
Product Vision
“Build insanely brilliant
and simple products that
change people's lives”
- Deep Nishar

13. Product Vision
“Build insanely brilliant
and simple products that
change people's lives”
- Deep Nishar
LinkedIn’s experience methodology
is designed to be simple, unified,
delightful, and actionable.
go/katy

14. DaVinci
Design consistency
!
Re-usable styles and widgets
!
Branding
!
Voice and Tone
go/davinci

15. Voice & Tone
Enabling Inviting Supportive
go/voiceandtone

16. Performance
Faster sites make for a
better user experience.
go/rumdashboard

17. Our mobile moment is coming
Mobile
50%
2014
go/mobile-team

18. Increase engagement through
content translation, localization
and geo-customization.
go/i18n
US
94MM
NON-US
186MM
Internationalization and Localization
i18n and L10n

19. Members first

20. Product Development Process

21. Feature
scoped
1
Features
designed
and reviewed
2
Sprint planning
and resources
allocated
3
Spe
rece
produ
/or
Initiate contact with
SRE, and stay in touch!
Feature Development Flow

22. Feature Development Flow
ning
ces
d
Specification
received from
Product Manager
/or Tech Lead
4
Test Engineer
begins test
planning and
strategy
5
Developers
(back-end/
front-end)
write code
6
Code
and p
inte
envi
Initiate contact with
SRE, and stay in touch!
Remember to coordinate
ramp plan with SRE
Remember to coordinate
ramp plan with SRE

23. rs
d/
)
e
Code committed
and pushed to
integration
environment
7
Test Engineer
begins manual and
automated testing
8
Sign-off from Service
Owner, then
devise release and
ramp plan
9
Ramp
to al
in p
Remember to coordinate
ramp plan with SRE
Feature Development Flow

24. mitted
d to
on
ent
Test Engineer
begins manual and
automated testing
8
Sign-off from Service
Owner, then
devise release and
ramp plan
9
Ramp until 100%
to all members
in production
10
Remember to coordinate
ramp plan with SRE
Feature Development Flow

25. Product Design
Product
design sign-off
Only User Experience
Design (UED)
leads/managers
Product
sign-off
Executives give
final approval
BAM
office hours
Brand and Marketing
(BAM) team and
Steve Johnson
go/productreview

26. Using the vision from Product, the visuals
from Design and the infrastructure from
Engineering, Web Developers bring the
User Experience to life.
Web Development
go/webdev

27. Everyone can help! Use our products daily
to find bugs and suggest enhancements!
Test Engineers
Test Engineers live by the motto
“proud to ship with high quality”.
!
Features only make it into production if our
Testing Teams are proud to release it.

28. How we work: Agile/Scrum
10-20
days
Daily
Scrum
meeting
IterationIteration backlog
Product backlog
as prioritized by
Product owner
Backlog tasks
expanded
by team
Potentially
shippable product
increment
go/agile

29. Jira
Our global Bug and Task tracker
BugsProjects Enhancements
go/jira

30. Systems Architecture

31. Aspirational Architecture
“Provide abstractions that
make it easier to reason about
the LinkedIn architecture.”
- Swee Lim, Distinguished Software Engineer
go/superblock
Front end
Business logic layer
Super BlockData access layer
Infrastructure
Mid Tier

32. Framework and language agnostic
way to handle requests for data from
internal services.
Rest.li
Profile
go/restli

33. Fizzy
Combine UI components from
different applications into a single
page.
!
Server side (i18n) and client-side
(embeds) rendering logic.
go/fizzy

34. Template
Dust
LinkedIn’s template engine for server and client side rendering
Dust
=
Output
HTMLData
go/howtodust

35. QuickDeploy against EI (QEI)
Selectively deploy and run services
during development.
!
Requests for other services handled
by our Early Integration environment.
Profile
go/qei

36. From request to front-end
*PoP may be in a data
center that is not running
the full app stack
Point of Presence*
NetScaler External Load
Balancers (SSL)
L0 Proxy
Apache Traffic Server
L1 Proxy
Apache Traffic Server
HAProxy
Context path resolution
E.g. /api/
Move all traffic to HTTPS
!
Enhance security and protection
!
Redirect logic (mobile devices)
!
Map url to applications
!
Multi-colo routing logic
LinkedIn Data Center
Application Containers
go/multicolo-routing

37. Release Process

38. How code gets to production
ReviewBoard
approved
!
Commit/Push
Run unit tests on
CI server
!
(1-5 mins)
PCS
(integration tests)
PCL
Tests the health
of trunk
If unit tests pass, code
committed pushed
!
Artifact built
PRE PCLPCS

39. SRE’s
notified prod deploy
is about to occur
How code gets to production
Publish artifact
(certified good)
Service Owner
certifies build is
ready to go to
production
Automated service
certification.
Sends the status
back to CRT
Ramp plan should already
have been identified
Artifact is pushed to
EI/EI2
EI EI2

40. How code gets to production
Service Owner
certifies build is
ready to go to
production
Automated service
certification.
Sends the status
back to CRT
SRE’s
notified prod deploy
is about to occur
Ramp plan should already
have been identified
Publish artifact
(certified good)
Artifact is pushed to
EI/EI2
EI EI2
Artifact deployed to
production canary
machines.
If canary looks good,
deploy to all
production nodes
LIX experiment used to
control ramp to members

41. LID - LinkedIn Deployment Tool
Deployment
Next generation deployment tool for
fine grained control of distributed
systems at LinkedIn.
Artifactory
go/lid

42. CRT
Check the status of your checkin
from commit to deployment.
go/crt
How do you know where your code is?

43. Code

44. Trunk Development
Trunk development - no branches
If unit test fails in PCS. Auto-revert.
If failed in PCL, lock trunk and investigate.
Once issue confirmed resolved,
unlock trunk.
“Ship it” from code owners and reviewers.
Pass local unit tests and commit to trunk.
Issue identified through CRT.
Fix committed.
go/mp
PCS
PCL

45. Network and Multiproduct
Network Trunk Multiproducts
Network trunk: original svn repository
!
Multiproduct: Code management
containers for testing, building, QA and
deployment outside of network trunk.
!
Mint: Tool for managing multiproducts.
FlexibleModular Dependency ManagementStandardized
go/mp

46. Code reviews
Small atomic commits.
!
How well are you solving the
problem?
!
Accompanying unit tests and
documentation a must.
go/codereview
Ship it!

47. Shipping code
Application Code Automated Tests Documentation

48. Why documentation matters
"Instead of imagining that our main task is
to instruct a computer what to do, let us
concentrate rather on explaining to human
beings what we want a computer to do."
- Donald Knuth

49. Site Operations

50. Operations group
Ensure LinkedIn has the
infrastructure and resources
needed to be stable at a huge scale.
go/siteops

51. Autometrics
“Self-service” model for
collectively adding metrics
into our graphing system.
go/autometrics

52. Ingraphs
Dynamic visualization
for the data collected
by Autometrics and
other sources.
Week-over-week
comparisons
Real-time
browsing
Personal
dashboards
go/ingraphs

53. LiX (LinkedIn Experimentation Platform)
Allows for A/B test framework
to allow new, modified, or
experimental features to be
deployed to a small segment
of the LI user base.
!
Also used to carefully control the
ramp of new features in production.
20%80%
go/lix

54. The NOC
Centralized Team for site
monitoring and status
reporting of GCNs.
!
#noc
Network Operations Center
go/noc

55. Data Centers
ELA4 - Los Angeles LVA1 - Virginia Texas
Planned 2014
go/datacenters

56. Akamai, Limelight and Level 3
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Delivers content to our members
with high availability, performance
and reduced latency.

57. Critical site issue escalation
If you see something
that doesn’t look right,
report it!
go/issuecritical
1-855-832-LINK
site-issue-critical@linkedin.com
go/issuecritical
Non Critical Email: site-issue@linkedin.com
#noc

58. Security
Security is everyone’s concern.
!
Members must feel that there data
is safe with us.
go/learnsecurity

59. Being Data Driven

60. UX Research
Research talks to the field
to inspire and inform our
teams on what to do next

61. Using data to drive User Centered Design
Product Data Bootcamp
Short course geared toward
new Product Managers on the
basics of using our massive
amounts of data as a PM.
Taught by data scientists and other data
experts once every quarter.
go/productdatabootcamp

62. Data Science
The Data Science Team delivers valuable data
to help us understand the
member and their site usage.
A/B
testing
Exposing
demographic trends
Product analytics and
data and business insights

63. XLNT
XLNT is an end-to-end A/B testing
solution, providing data for decisions
on product changes.
go/XLNT

64. Informed
go/informed
A stream of micro-updates about
deployments in production and
staging.
Web UI, IRC bot, CLI, REST API for reading and writing updates

65. Life at LinkedIn

66. Tech Life at LinkedIn
Hackdays
Weekly Tech Talks
Horizontal Initiatives
Incubator Program
Functional Leadership Groups
Knowledge Sharing
go/values
Hack, Collaborate, Share and Learn

68. Learning More
People
go/cinco
Info
Wiki
go/searchin
Code
go/codesearch-preview
go/codingconventions
Resources
LearnIn
Tech Talks

69. ©2013 LinkedIn Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

70. Appendix A
Systems

71. Data storage and distribution
Data Systems
Espresso
go/espresso
Also known as Pegasus, Rest.li is a REST
+JSON framework for building robust, scalable
service architectures using dynamic discovery
and simple asynchronous APIs.
Voldemort
go/voldemort
Voldemort is an open source distributed key-
value storage system developed at LinkedIn.
Databus
go/databus
Source-agnostic distributed change data
capture system, which is an integral part of
LinkedIn's data processing pipeline.
!
Also used for offline data replication.

72. Tech
System Foundation
Fizzy
go/fizzy
Fizzy is a piece of LinkedIn infrastructure that
is responsible for aggregating UI components
served off of different web applications into a
single page.
Rest.li (Pegasus)
go/restli
Rest.li is a REST+JSON framework for
building robust, scalable service
architectures using dynamic discovery and
simple asynchronous APIs
Apache Traffic Server
go/ats
Fast, scalable and extensible reverse proxy
and forward proxy HTTP server.

73. Tech
System Foundation
EKG
go/whatisekg
With canary validation, exception monitoring,
GC monitoring and auto-tuning, EKG is our
tool for monitoring the health of our systems in
production.
Hadoop
go/hadoop
Enables the distributed processing of large
data sets across clusters of commodity
servers.
Avro
go/espresso
Apache Avro™ is a data serialization system,
providing a serialization format for persistent
data and a compact binary format for
communication between services.

74. Frameworks
System Foundation
LISpring
go/lispring
LI Spring is an extended version of Spring, the
enterprise Java application development
framework with support dependency injection
(wiring of components) and much more.
Play
go/play
Play is an open source, lightweight, fully
reactive, stateless framework that
supports hot reload for Java and Scala.

75. Craig Sebenik
Staff Site Reliability Engineer
!
Derek Brown
Lead, Web Development
Subject Matter Experts

76. go/tech-foundations-slides
!
Survey - search tech onboarding