Getting to Know Karthikeyan Margam

Talent is LinkedIn’s number one operating priority and we have no shortage of talented individuals in technical roles across the company. These are the folks who create, build and maintain our platform, tools and features — as well as write the posts for this blog. Here, we are featuring some of the people and personalities that make LinkedIn great.

Karthikeyan Margam, a Senior Test Engineer, is part of the Content Experience test team and is currently working with the New York engineering team. His main role is to enable the team with the necessary test automation tools and framework. Since starting at LinkedIn in February 2009, Karthik has been part of the Pulse team and based out of the SF office. He has had a hand in many other key products like inbox, email, the network updates feed and sharing. He is passionate about code quality and craftsmanship and holds the teams responsible for a quality product development and delivery.

What is something not found on your LinkedIn profile?

In recent years, I discovered my love for long distance running and have successfully completed three San Francisco half marathons. I'm planning on participating in the New York City marathon soon.

What are your favorite things to do when you’re not at the office?

I love to go on long walks and photograph nature. I also love to watch comedy TV shows and movies.

What’s your favorite thing about working at LinkedIn?

There’s never a dull day at LinkedIn. Every day, there’s a chance to learn something new, be it a new tool or platform, or work on a challenging problem. Love the sense of ownership that’s prevalent across the company.

What do you do best at work?

Onboarding and enabling teams to use new test tools and frameworks. When LinkedIn started using KIF (for iOS apps) and Espresso (for Android apps) for mobile test automation, I was able to onboard and bootstrap the teams for two mobile apps to start writing tests across the stack. I love to instill a sense of craftsmanship and quality to the team I work with by equipping them with the tools required to build a successful product. Another part of my work that I enjoy is performing user experience and exploratory tests that help uncover issues that our users could potentially encounter. I also love to mentor junior and new engineers joining the team.

What tools do you use every day at LinkedIn?

I use a variety of open source tools that enable test automation like KIF, Android Espresso and CasperJs. There are also other in-house built tools that we use for monitoring and tracking the quality of products.

What do you love most about test engineering?

One of the best things is that we get the opportunity to dig deep in order to understand the application architecture and design. This allows me to author deterministic, fast, and reliable tests. These tests give quick feedback on the state of the application, allowing the team to progress accordingly.

Apart from setting a high quality bar, I also love how the role of a test engineer involves a lot of collaboration across different disciplines.