LinkedIn Interview Experience
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE2 role at LinkedIn in India and experienced a positive interview process covering coding, system design, and behavioral rounds. With 4 years of experience, I am awaiting a final offer, having received positive feedback from all stages.
Full Experience
I recently went through the interview process for an SDE2 role at LinkedIn, India (Apps). I applied about a month ago, and a recruiter reached out. The entire process after the initial screening (TPS) was very swift, with the recruiter providing feedback within a day or two after each round. I have 4 years of experience and previously worked as an SDE2 at a top product company, unfortunately being laid off in August. I noted that they were not offering SSE for candidates with under 5 years of experience. Although I haven't received a formal offer yet, the feedback from all my rounds has been positive. I initially applied via LinkedIn's easy apply feature.
Round 1:
This round focused on Data Structures & Algorithms, where I was asked two coding problems.
Round 2:
Another coding round with two problems, one involving heaps and another focusing on Tries.
Round 3: System Design
This round was dedicated to System Design concepts, specifically around monitoring.
Round 4: Technical Communication
This round involved discussing one of my projects in depth, followed by standard technical communication questions.
Host Manager:
The final round with the Host Manager included a deep dive into one of my projects, several behavioral questions, and a High-Level Design discussion for a malicious/spam URL detection system, including how I would execute the project end-to-end.
Interview Questions (6)
This question likely refers to the LeetCode problem where you have 'n' bulbs, initially off. You turn on all bulbs. Then, you turn off every second bulb. Then, you change the state of every third bulb, and so on. For the i-th round, you change the state of every i-th bulb. The goal is to find how many bulbs are on after 'n' rounds.
Given the 'root' of a binary tree, turn it upside down and return the new root. You can only flip a binary tree if it is a 'left-child only' binary tree or a 'right-child only' binary tree, or a 'balanced' binary tree with at most one child on each side. The 'upside down' property suggests that the original left children become the new root's right children, and the original root becomes the new right child's left child.
Given two sorted arrays, find the K smallest products that can be formed by taking one element from each array.
This question involved merging two Tries. I had to describe the algorithm and data structures involved in efficiently combining the information from two separate Trie data structures into a single one, ensuring all words from both original Tries are present in the merged Trie.
I was asked to design a system for collecting, storing, and visualizing metrics, as well as setting up monitoring and alerting. The discussion involved topics such as data ingestion, storage solutions (e.g., time-series databases), aggregation, dashboarding, and alert mechanisms.
I had to provide a High-Level Design for a system capable of detecting malicious or spam URLs. The discussion also covered the end-to-end execution plan for such a project, from initial design and development to deployment and ongoing maintenance, including aspects like data sources, detection algorithms, and integration points.