LinkedIn has scored a big talent win today, as Google Scientist and Tech Lead Daniel Tunkelang joins the professional social network to work on data initiatives (you can access Tunkelang’s LinkedIn profile here.)

According to Tunkelang’s blog post announcing the new job opportunity, he will be joining the data scientist team at LinkedIn, working under Chief Scientist DJ Patil. Tunkelang writes that he will be working on “products and discover insights from a data collection,” tackling the issues of “information extraction, matching, recommendation, social network analysis, and network visualization.”

Prior to joining Google in 2009, Tunkelang was the Chief Scientist and co-founder of Endeca, a vendor of search applications for enterprises.

It’s no secret that LinkedIn is making a big push towards mining data on the network to offer compelling products and visualizations to members.

This isn’t the first Googler to join LinkedIn; earlier this year senior software engineer for the Android platform Cedric Beust left the search giant to work on mobile for LinkedIn.