Spotlight Series: Lily Wittle
Our?Spotlight Series?aims to highlight women in different Engineering teams across LinkedIn. Featured writers provide insight into their role and what they do at LinkedIn.
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Spotlight:?Lily Wittle, Senior Software Engineer, Systems Infra, at LinkedIn
By 1st grade, I knew I wanted to be a math major. Math was my favorite subject throughout all of grade school. When I committed to the University of Miami, I decided to attend the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, a program where you double major in marine science and your choice of something else. It had been a no-brainer that math would be my “something else,” but during my senior year of high school, I enjoyed my computer science class so much that I decided to start a CS major as well. Four years later, I graduated with a triple major in marine science, applied math, and computer science. I spent my three college summers trying out the three subjects: a software engineering internship, an applied math research experience, and an ocean modeling internship. After discovering that I enjoyed software engineering most of all, I joined LinkedIn as a new college grad.?
At LinkedIn, I’m a software engineer on the Gateway as a Platform (GaaP) team in New York. We build infrastructure that enables LinkedIn products to access the outside Internet in a secure and standardized way. For example, when a LinkedIn user shares a LinkedIn post as a Tweet, our infrastructure is used to communicate with Twitter. From its start as an acquisition of a service allowing LinkedIn users to import their email contacts, GaaP has grown in scope and expanded its offerings; now, there are 100+ client teams using our infrastructure.?
What is unique about being on an infrastructure team??
The main difference between infrastructure teams and product teams is that infrastructure engineers build software that’s used by other software engineers. So for infrastructure engineers at LinkedIn, our “clients” are other engineers at the company, not the end users of the LinkedIn product. It’s simpler to put ourselves in our clients’ shoes, since they’re LinkedIn engineers just like us and are familiar with the same tooling and processes. However, I was surprised to find that a “client support” role can be a leadership position as well; being a reliable and thorough source of information can work wonders for establishing yourself as a leader and subject matter expert in your domain. When I led a project helping our clients migrate to a new system, many of them looked to me for GaaP expertise even after the project was over.?
One of the best aspects about being on an infrastructure team is the sheer number of partner teams we work with, since our platform is used by so many. We focus on cultivating positive working relationships, as it’s a win-win for both parties. For example, client teams who are willing to be pilot cases for our new features are able to receive the benefits of these features earlier, plus priority support. Relationship building with client teams pays off for individual engineers as well as teams. Working on an infrastructure team makes it easy to forge lots of connections across the company outside of your immediate team. As a new college grad who only knew one person at the company when I first joined LinkedIn, this was a natural way for me to meet new people and helped grow my network.?
Working on an infrastructure team provides opportunities to have a wide impact. A single infrastructure project can be leveraged to enable multiple features across the company. Infrastructure teams frequently look to expand their scope, aiming to be applicable to more and more use cases to increase their impact. It’s exciting to play a part in so many different projects; I’m thankful to work in such a rewarding field of software engineering. If you want to learn more about what Infrastructure teams are working on at LinkedIn,?check out our engineering blog: https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/topic/infrastructure
Want to see more posts like this? Check out our past Spotlights HERE