I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Jun 2013
Interview
I was contacted by a LinkedIn recruiter. She was very responsive over email.
I then had a phone screen with an engineer. The phone screen did exactly what a phone screen should, it made sure I wasn't lying on my resume. The interviewer had me do some basic coding over collabnet. He also was very helpful in answering my questions about the company.
Having passed the phone screen I went in for an in-person interview. It was an all day affair where I got there at 10 and was out by 5:30 or so. The day consisted of a series of 45 minute interviews with pairs of engineers and managers from various groups in the department for which I was interviewing.
They have a well oiled interview machine going there. When I arrived they presented me with a loaner iPad which had my interview schedule, they gave me a tour of the campus, and when I got to the actual room where I was going to interview they had a number of goodies for me as gifts.
Unlike companies such as Google, the interview questions were aimed at assessing my skills rather than establishing the interviewer's alpha-geek status. Many questions were challenging without being "gotcha" questions. They were the sort of questions that an experienced engineer should be able to answer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Consider an X x Y array of 1's and 0s. The X axis represents "influences" meaning that X influences Y. So, for example, if $array[3,7] is 1 that means that 3 influences 7.
An "influencer" is someone who influences every other person, but is not influenced by any other member.
Given such an array, write a function to determine whether or not an "influencer" exists in the array.
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.