How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems

How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems

Author: Software Engineering Daily August 18, 2026 Duration: 47:51

News feeds and recommendation systems have long relied on deep learning architectures that score each candidate item independently. As LLMs have matured, they have opened up a fundamentally different approach, where a system can reason about content the way it reasons about language. However, that power comes with a fresh set of engineering challenges around cost, scale, and evaluation.

LinkedIn recently rebuilt its news feed to treat content recommendation as a sequence modeling problem. The general approach is to predict what a user will want next, much like an LLM predicts the next token in a sentence.

Tim Jurka has worked at LinkedIn for 13 years and is currently a VP of Engineering. In this episode, Tim joins Matt Merrill to discuss how LinkedIn re-engineered its feed, how the team combines LLMs with traditional signals, managing inference costs at massive scale, steering content quality using natural language policies, and more.

Sponsorship inquiries:
sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.


Dive into the vast Podcast Archives-Software Engineering Daily, a curated collection of in-depth technical conversations that have defined the landscape of modern software development. This archive goes beyond surface-level news, offering a permanent record of deep-dive discussions with engineers, researchers, and founders who are building the tools and platforms shaping our digital world. Each episode is a focused exploration, unpacking complex topics like distributed systems, machine learning infrastructure, programming language design, and the practical challenges of scaling technology. You'll hear firsthand accounts of architectural decisions, post-mortems on system failures, and thoughtful debates on emerging paradigms. It’s a resource built for the curious professional who values substance over soundbites, providing context and depth that shorter formats simply cannot. Whether you're looking to understand the historical context behind a current technology, reinforce your foundational knowledge, or discover niche specialties, this podcast archive serves as an essential, ever-growing library. The conversations are detailed, technical, and assume a level of familiarity with the field, making it a trusted companion for continuous learning. Listen to this podcast not for fleeting headlines, but for the enduring insights and nuanced expertise that come from thoughtful, long-form dialogue with the people writing the code and designing the systems that run our world.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 50

Software Engineering Daily
Podcast Episodes
Grafana’s Approach to AI-Native Observability [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:29
Advanced software systems have long been more complex than any single engineer can fully understand. Observability is the established solution to this problem, but with AI agents now generating code, deploying changes, a…
Building Software That People Love [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:26
Building great software always involves technical problem solving, but the best software goes beyond function. It feels fluid, coherent, and genuinely fun to use. This quality lives at the intersection of engineering and…
Mina the Hollower [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:48
Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in…
Foundation Models for Structured Data [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:00
Predictive modeling is a core element in modern systems, and powers capabilities such as fraud detection, loan approvals, and recommendation systems. These systems typically operate on structured, relational data stored…
Biome and the Future of JavaScript Tooling [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:56
Modern web development requires an ever-growing collection of tools including formatters, linters, bundlers, and plugins. Each tool typically has its own configuration, dependencies, and performance cost. As applications…
Preparing for Q-Day [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:18
Most of the cryptography securing the internet today rests on mathematical problems that classical computers cannot solve in any reasonable timeframe. That assumption is now being tested. Recent advances in quantum compu…
Developing Multiplayer Games in Godot [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:21
Multiplayer games are among the hardest software systems to build, requiring developers to synchronize state across unreliable networks while maintaining fairness, performance, and a responsive player experience. Latency…
Web Native Game Development [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:08
The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Uni…
The Hardware Bottleneck AI Can’t Fix [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:47
Software engineering has developed powerful tools for observability, data management, and continuous testing, but hardware engineering has largely not kept pace. The feedback loops, tooling, and infrastructure that softw…