Interview Experience || LinkedIn || Software Engineer || Applications Teams

Hi All,

I recently had the opportunity to interview at LinkedIn, and I wanted to share my interview experience.

I applied through LinkedIn, and a recruiter reached out to me. The process started with a 45-minute conversation covering my past projects, reasons for wanting to switch, and other general questions with Recruiter.

Phone Screening Round

Duration: 60 minutes

• 20 minutes: Detailed discussion about my past projects.
• 40 minutes: DSA question with two parts.

DSA Question: Given a mobile keypad where each number maps to a set of alphabets, along with a list of words, find all the words that can be formed using a given number sequence. There was also an extension to this problem.

The round went well, and I received a call from the recruiter informing me that I would be moving forward to the loop interviews.

Loop Interviews

1. DSA Round (2 Questions)

Question 1: Sliding Window

Given a binary sequence, find the length of the longest contiguous subarray containing at most K 1s.

Question 2: BST

Find the Kth closest element in a Binary Search Tree (BST).

My Feedback: I was able to solve both questions, but my solution to the second question had some bugs, and I ran out of time to debug them.

Recruiter's Feedback: I took too much time to arrive at an optimized solution for the second question, and my implementation had some bugs.

2. DSA with AI

Problem: LRU Cache Implementation

Boilerplate code was already provided. There were four questions that needed to be solved sequentially.

The catch was that we were not allowed to modify the code manually. We had to use AI for everything, including implementing solutions, debugging, and even making small changes to the data model.

My Feedback: I was able to solve all four questions successfully.

3. Technical Communication Round

This round involved deep discussions about a couple of my past projects.

My Feedback: The round went well.

4. System Design Round

Problem Statement:

Design a system that tracks exceptions thrown by a service and identifies the top K most frequently occurring and least frequently occurring exceptions within a sliding time window (for example, from 8:30 to 8:34).

My Feedback: I would say this round went average. I was able to answer all the questions, but I struggled to justify some of my design decisions against the non-functional requirements.

Recruiter's Feedback: I was able to arrive at a solution, but my explanation lacked depth. I also couldn't adequately justify how the proposed design would satisfy all the non-functional requirements.

5. Managerial Round

This round consisted of behavioral questions, discussions about my past projects, and a few puzzles.

Recruiter's Feedback: The hiring manager was not satisfied with the customer impact and scale of the projects I had worked on in my previous roles.

Final Outcome: Not Selected

I received the overall feedback from the recruiter after completing all the interview rounds.

All the best to everyone preparing!