Career stories: Breaking barriers with LinkedIn

After interning with us, Beatrix resonated with the culture and community she found at LinkedIn, and rejoined us post-undergrad. As she continues exploring her passion for frontend (UI) and accessibility engineering, she shares why launching her career with LinkedIn is one of the best decisions she has made.

From intern to engineer

In 2019, my career with LinkedIn started with a UI (frontend) engineering internship in the San Francisco office. I had done a bit of user experience (UX) work before, so I was excited that there was a specific frontend role for interns at LinkedIn. I learned a lot about frontend development and immersed myself in LinkedIn's culture. After my internship, I felt like I had barely scratched the surface of all there was for me to learn at LinkedIn, and I was so happy to get a return offer as a UI engineer on the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team after I graduated in 2020. 

I had a bit of an untraditional path to engineering — I've always been creative and loved taking Latin, but I started taking an interest in computer science during high school, which continued into my undergraduate studies at Vassar. Computer science combined many things I liked about science with my love for humanities and logic; it's truly a multidisciplinary field. 

I honed these skills during my extracurriculars in college as a teaching assistant with Kode with Klossy, a summer camp that helps teach teen girls how to code, and through attending the Grace Hopper Celebration, a women in tech conference. It was a full-circle moment when I had the privilege to attend the virtual Grace Hopper Conference in 2020 with LinkedIn. 

A culture of Next Plays

One of the attributes that kept me here is LinkedIn’s culture of transformation. With every team I've been on, there's a lot of celebration of people's “Next Plays” as we call it here, whether that’s a new job opportunity or promotion at LinkedIn itself or elsewhere. 

While I enjoyed my time working on LinkedIn Marketing Solutions’ Campaign Manager, after 1.5 years on the team, I was eager to dive deeper into a new challenge and more accessibility work, to better support diverse learners and LinkedIn users (or members as we call them) with disabilities. 

Thanks to LinkedIn's wonderful culture that has an emphasis on collaboration and mentorship, I was able to connect with engineers from across the engineering organization to find a role that combined my interests in accessibility engineering, and development for the main LinkedIn site. With that mentorship, I found a new role earlier this year on our LinkedIn Talent Solutions team, centered on the job search and evaluation engineering work. 

I've always found LinkedIn to be very human in its approach to work, because everything we do stems from our mission to build economic opportunities and connections for people. The job search team is focused on trying to help people get jobs and with our accessibility impact, we make more jobs accessible to every member of the global workforce. This focus was also seen in other roles that I’ve had at LinkedIn. While on the LMS team, I got to work on our reflow efforts, which ensures that the pages in Campaign Manager are usable on many screen sizes and at different zoomed-in levels. 

50M job seekers visit LinkedIn every week — resulting in 95 job applications every second, and six hires every minute. To help job seekers find their dream jobs at that scale is incredibly rewarding, and I feel very fortunate to contribute directly to those outcomes as an engineer.  

Being there through the tough times

And LinkedIn’s human approach transcends the work itself. I grew up in Los Angeles, and I’m incredibly close to my parents, and two sisters: one who’s in high school, and one in college.

I remember getting pulled into a family emergency where I had to unexpectedly fly back home from San Francisco to help, and told my manager, “I’m not sure when I’ll be back [in San Francisco].” My team and managers were incredibly compassionate, and I was able to spend time with my family and fly back to visit them as needed to help support during this difficult time. 

I was also able to be in Los Angeles from Thanksgiving to New Years with my family, working remotely from LA. The flexibility and earnest support I’ve received from my team during both the good and the tough times have meant the world.

Craftsmanship in engineering

On the technical side of the house, one of the things that impresses me about LinkedIn is engineering’s emphasis on craftsmanship here, especially on our Talent Solutions team. We invest a lot into the foundations of our code base and code quality, ensuring that we are writing code that we can build on in the future. 

While working on new features for the site is always exciting, I am also grateful to have the opportunity to work on the efforts that improve the site behind the scenes, like documentation and other quality-of-life changes. Many teams at LinkedIn are trying to push foundational work initiatives like this forward. Documentation is one of those things that always comes up in developer productivity and happiness here at LinkedIn, so I’m glad to be able to contribute in ways that help make my colleagues’ work lives easier. 

Recently, my team discussed a situation with a contractor who came into the code base and thought our code tests did not make sense. This confusion sparked us to begin renaming the tests, changing the wording, and agreeing on the clearest way of labeling our code tests. I have so appreciated having space for these discussions; although product users will never see this, it is something that makes our code so much more reliable. 

Breaking barriers through Women in Tech

Since I joined LinkedIn full-time in the midst of remote work during the pandemic, I wanted to find ways to connect with other engineers. I’m so thankful that LinkedIn has given me those opportunities; I was one of the founding members of the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions branch of Women in Tech (LMS WiT), and joined our Out@In (i.e., LGBTQIA+) Employee Resource Group (ERG). It is incredible how leadership opportunities aren't gated to you based on age or company tenure at LinkedIn. I was able to grow and learn so much about what it means to be organized, to be a leader, and what it means to think about how I am in a position to help the WIT community, to facilitate these learnings.

Within LMS WiT, I helped to co-found the Amplify Voices track. Shortly after joining, I raised that we should rename our Male Allies track. I had heard from several nonbinary employees on our LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team that were wondering if there was room for them within WiT. It was powerful to me that my group was receptive to my idea and changed the name to WiT Allies the very next day, so that more LinkedIn employees felt included. If you're interested in equality, empowerment, and these events that are focused on how to speak up for yourself in a professional setting, it's essential to have these discussions about inclusiveness. 

Anytime I had a suggestion in ERGs, it was always considered thoughtfully and there was a lot of trust placed in me even as a young professional. In LinkedIn’s ERGs, there's this openness that breaks down artificial limits and helps us grow as leaders. This spirit of inclusiveness is what makes LinkedIn such a welcoming place. 

About Beatrix

Beatrix is a frontend (UI) engineer on our LinkedIn Talent Solutions team. Prior to her current role, Beatrix was a UI engineering intern and a UI engineer on our LinkedIn Marketing Solutions team. She graduated from Vassar College with a degree in computer science. In her free time, Beatrix enjoys spending time with her two cats, Mr. Darcy and Georgiana, cross-stitching and crocheting, and gaming.

Editor’s note: Considering an engineering/tech career at LinkedIn? In this Career Stories series, you’ll hear first-hand from our engineers and technologists about real life at LinkedIn — including our meaningful work, collaborative culture, and transformational growth. For more on tech careers at LinkedIn, visit: lnkd.in/EngCareers.