Getting to Know Josh Clemm

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 that create, build and maintain our platform, tools and features - as well as write the posts for this blog. We are featuring some of the people and personalities that make LinkedIn great.

Name: Josh Clemm
LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshclemm
Position: Senior Engineering Manager

Josh Clemm is a senior engineering manager at LinkedIn, currently leading SlideShare's mobile and knowledge teams. He previously led the Higher Education team to build products for students and schools, and worked on Member Profile page improvements. Before joining LinkedIn, Josh worked at Qualcomm and Lockheed Martin. He holds a Master of Science in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo.

What is something not found on your LinkedIn profile?
Not much. As a former engineer and manager on the profile team, we used our own profiles to test many features in production so I think I’ve added my whole life to it so far. :)

In all seriousness, my profile probably suggests a heavy engineering background, but I also love the arts (design, writing, literature, etc.). In fact, I'm also an editor for our engineering blog and have written a few posts myself (Scaling LinkedIn, University pages, Field of Study tool, and the New Profile).

What are your favorite things to do when you’re not at the office?
I actually like to code when I have free time. I have a few Android apps, including Earthquake Alert! and Draft Punk, published on Google Play and I like to keep them up to date. Check them out and let me know your feedback!

I’ve also been reading a lot more books and am a fan of fiction. Some recent highlights are Ready Player One and Red Rising. On the tech side, I’m reading and loving Hello, Startup from former colleague Yevgeniy (Jim) Brikman.

What’s your favorite thing about working at LinkedIn?
Building products that millions of people use every day. It’s always energizing and exciting to turn on a new feature or make a small performance improvement and to see massive step functions in our real-time graphs.

I’ve had some great opportunities so far working on and managing the profile team, leading our student and education engineering teams, and finally focusing on building our knowledge and mobile products at SlideShare.

What do you do best at work?
I enjoy building a strong culture within my engineering teams. Because I appreciate tech, design, and product, I love to encourage all members of the team to collaborate, brainstorm new ideas, and most importantly, have fun doing it.

What do you love most about software engineering?
One area that’s always interested me is architecting large software systems. When I started at LinkedIn, I learned to love all the parts involved in building a multi-tiered service based architecture (microservices, caching, monitoring, performance, abstraction, vertical and horizontal scaling).

I was fortunate to work on full stack features for many years of my career and now, as a manager, I can advise and mentor other engineers on the evolution and best practices of how to scale a system. It’s both challenging and rewarding.