Linkedin hired a 3x sudoku world champion to build its games

Thomas Snyder has a PhD in chemistry from Harvard, spent over a decade leading genomics research teams, and once ranked among the most decorated competitive puzzle solvers on the planet. LinkedIn looked at that résumé and thought: yes, that's exactly who we need to design our daily brain teasers. The hire sounds absurd until you realize it isn't. Not even slightly.

From biotech labs to linkedin's puzzle room

Snyder, now 46, is a three-time World Sudoku Champion who walked away from a career in biotechnology in 2012 to launch Grandmaster Puzzles, a business built entirely around the craft of constructing logic puzzles. He'd spent years publishing work for free on blogs, watching a niche community grow without much commercial infrastructure to support it. Then he asked himself a question that changed everything: if I took puzzles seriously, how far could I go?

Further than most would have predicted. Within a year, Grandmaster Puzzles had secured a regular slot in Penny Dell Puzzles. Eventually, Netflix came calling. Then LinkedIn did too — first as a consulting arrangement, then, in October 2024, as a full-time role with a title that has never existed before at a major tech company: Principal Puzzle Master.

Why linkedin is betting on puzzles at all

LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, introduced its games section in 2024 and now runs seven daily puzzle formats, including Queens, Zip, and the recently launched Patches. Each one resets daily. Each one feeds into a leaderboard that lets users see how they stack up against colleagues in their network. The social hook is deliberate and, frankly, well-engineered.

Laksh Somasundaram, LinkedIn's senior director of product, frames it in terms of workplace culture rather than engagement metrics.