I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Apr 2018
Interview
I applied online and was contacted by a recruiter the next day. The recruiter was very helpful - she had a lot of information about the position and the interview process. After I talked with her, she emailed me with many tips and links to help me prepare for the interview. There was a separate person in charge of scheduling the interview who sent me the names of my interviewers and links to their LinkedIn profiles beforehand. I had 2 interviewers for the 1-hour technical phone screen. We spent 10-15 mins talking about my experience, ~5 mins on a warm-up coding question, and the rest of the time on a harder coding question. We had a slight technical mishap, but it was quickly remedied. We ended up going about 10 mins over so that I could ask them some questions. After the interview, it took 2 days to receive a decision. I appreciated their promptness in contacting me after I applied, scheduling the interview, and notifying me with the decision. Even though I did not make it to the next stage of interviews, I felt that their overall attitude was that they wanted to help candidates interview successfully rather than looking for reasons to reject people.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a function to calculate the maximum depth of a binary tree.
Calculate the shortest distance between 2 words in a word list. The word list is given to the constructor, and may contain more than 1 instance of each word. Example: "the quick brown fox quick jumps", distance(fox, quick) should return 1 (indices for fox = (3), quick = (1, 4), smallest distance is between 3 & 4)
The phone screen was more intense than I'd anticipated, lasting about 45 minutes with a mix of behavioral and technical questions. They probed my understanding of system design, specifically challenging me to think through a notification delivery service. I felt prepared, thanks to the company-specific questions I found on PracHub that outlined similar scenarios. The final rounds focused heavily on the scalability and reliability of systems. After a series of interviews, I received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, it was a rigorous but rewarding experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design LinkedIn's notification fan-out service that delivers post-engagement notifications (e.g. someone reacted to your post or commented on your article) to millions of subscribers in near real-time, including how you would handle 'hotspot' creators with millions of followers, deduplicate redundant notifications when many actions target the same content, and guarantee at-least-once delivery across regional failures.
I applied online. I interviewed at LinkedIn (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2026
Interview
Had an initial phone screen round-
Questions - Regular Medium level question, string manipulation
Follow up - Concurrency related on top of the first question.
Waiting for the second round right now
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at LinkedIn (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
Was greeted by a person who basically walked me around the office during my interview, did a couple of rounds with a group on a whiteboard solving a coding challenge, and one to solve a software architecture challenge. Had lunch onsite. And one round of interview with someone who wasn't technical.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write the code to generate an English language rendition of any integer up to 100,000,000.