Yes, for starters they wrote things like Kafka and Samza there @ LinkedIn. I consider this post required reading for anyone wanting to build serious business distributed data pipelines, and guess where it came from? :)

https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

World class engineers (especially data eng) who built some amazing open source things, but internally was a mess.

The reason LinkedIn is a terrible product is because it was mired internally by chronically poor engineering leadership and product politics. Nothing ever got shipped. This new rollout is nice but 5 years too late.

I'm really hoping the MSFT buy will change things, as I really believe in the product and there are some great engineers there.

A number of notable opensource projects in the big data space were started at LinkedIn. Kafka is probably the most prominent example but there are others too. So I'd say they're fairly known for their engineering. You definitely don't get good projects like that coming out of a company without really good engineers making them.

Kafka, Samza, Databus, etc. LinkedIn is pretty capable when it comes to engineering. From what I've seen, most people's beef with LI tends to be product-related

Yes, they kind of overdid it in fact. They created Kafka, for example

pretty much every big company in silicon valley is known for their engineering talent, since top talent just moves around from company to company (e.g: lots of ex-googlers, ex-facebook, etc).

The only nugget that sticks in my mind was the massive password hack a few years ago.

I wonder if Linkedin has a lot of MS tech in their stack? If so, and MS wants to push further into consumer facing services in the cloud, I can see why this appointment might make sense.