LinkedIn Professional Network  ·  View 03 of 30  ·  2 · People and journeys

Actors and Their Core Journeys

Who this is for, and what each of them actually gets to do with it, including the machines that act without being asked.

Editable source SVG draw.io All views
Members Job seeker assumed 50M / month Goal — Find a role that fits me, and always know where my application stands. Core journeys Search and apply to a job view 04 Track my applications Get a job alert Professional 1.2B members Goal — Keep up with the people I have worked with, and be found by the right ones. Core journeys Connect with someone I met view 17 Catch up on my feed view 14 Message a connection view 18 Creator assumed 8M posts / day Goal — Publish something useful and watch it reach the people who care about it. Core journeys Publish a post with video view 05 Reply to comments Read post analytics Hirers and buyers Recruiter paid seat Goal — Find qualified people who are open to a move, and get a reply from them. Core journeys Search and reach out view 06 Manage a shortlist Employer admin company page Goal — Post a job and represent my company without buying a recruiter seat. Core journeys Post and close a job Review applicants Publish a company update Advertiser via the Ads platform Goal — Put a sponsored post in front of a precise audience and pay only for delivery. Core journeys Run a sponsored campaign The people who run it Trust & Safety reviewer 24x7 queues Goal — Decide the worst content first, and have every decision stand up on appeal. Core journeys Work the review queue view 30 Take down a fake-account ring On-call SRE per service, 24x7 Goal — See which colo or dependency is hurting members before members notice. Core journeys Shift traffic out of a colo view 22 Triage an SLO burn view 24 Relevance engineer feed, search, jobs Goal — Ship a better ranking model safely, behind a ramp I can reverse. Core journeys Ramp a model in an A/B test view 25 Machines and partners Fan-out workers Samza · nearline Goal — Put a new post into every normal follower's inbox within seconds. Core journeys Fan out a post view 15 Offline push jobs Spark · daily Goal — Land fresh recommendations in Venice before members wake up. Core journeys Push derived data view 11 Third-party app OAuth client Goal — Sign members in with LinkedIn and read only what they consented to. Core journeys Sign in with LinkedIn view 28 LinkedIn — Actors and Their Core Journeys Person or role Journey / task Security / platform External / third party Member count is LinkedIn's published figure; every other volume is a planning assumption. v 1.0 · owner Product + Enterprise Architecture · date 2026-09

Why these actors

  • Every view in acts 3 to 7 serves at least one journey on this page; a view that served none was cut
  • Fan-out workers and offline push jobs are on the cast list because members feel their SLAs: a post missing from an inbox, recommendations a day stale
  • Goals are written in the actor's own voice. A job title cannot be argued with; a goal can

The awkward actors

  • The recruiter pays per seat and per InMail credit, which makes part of messaging a financial system with strong-consistency needs
  • The creator is judged in the first hour, the window where the platform knows least about the post
  • The third-party app is an attacker's favourite front door. Its token carries scopes, never a session

Assumptions

  • 50M active job seekers a month and 8M posts a day are planning numbers, not LinkedIn figures
  • Trust & Safety works 24x7 queues across regions, so the review tool is a product with its own SLOs
  • Relevance teams ship many ranking changes a week, so the ramp system sits on the critical path of product velocity
◀  High-Level Architecture All views Journey — Job Seeker, Search to Status  ▶
Solution Architecture v1.0 · LinkedIn's own stack in LinkedIn-run colos · Enterprise Architecture · 2026-0903-actors-and-journeys