Linkedin SR SWE Role: System Infrastructure Engineering (Bangalore)
Summary
I underwent a month-long interview process for a Senior Staff Software Engineer role in System Infrastructure Engineering at LinkedIn, Bangalore, which included an OA, telephonic, and four onsite rounds. Despite receiving a 'Not Hire' feedback due to performance in a coding round and the Hiring Manager's feedback, I encountered several specific coding and system design challenges.
Full Experience
Linedkin Recruiter reach out to me via linkedin, The entire process took 1 month exactly consist of 1 Intro round, 1 OA (online assesment), 1 telephonic, 4 Onsite Round(Online Rounds).
Current stack : SDE-3 (Golang/Backend Engineer)
Intro Call: HR asked questions related to profile and looking out for candidates with good system knowledge.
Telephonic Round: Asked 1 Coding Question, It is java specific role so they asked java questions mostly oops related
OA: Hackerrank Assesment having 3 questions, able to solve 2 completely and 1 partially with 2 cases going TLE.
Onsite Rounds:
Coding Round1: Question 1: given the logs find out time taken by each function, inclusive and exclusive time Question 2: LCA of BST.
Feedback: Hire
Coding Round 2: Question 1: Merging 2 B+ tree Question 2: Djikstra Algorithm, initially it was solved with Queue because it was considered to be unit distance and later they have given distances.
Feedback: Not able to solve 1st question entirely.
System Design Round: Asked to implement Key Value Store, Discuss FR and NFR and able to come up with approach where storing the data in the Ram and for HA/Backup keeping it in FileStorage. Have been asked a good follow up question. Feedback: Hire - Average rating
Hiring Manager Round: 15 mins late to interview and gave the negative feedback stating didnt have depth knowledge of the things worked on.
Hire: Not Hire
Note: Just use linkedin tag questions for round 1 and round2. they are enough but they usually give it with class and method signature to make it tricky. Focus on Designing the system from scratch. and All the best if your hiring manager is not good fit for the role :P.
Feedback: Not Hire. Feeedback receieved that they are looking out for strong hire candidated. From my side I was not able to do good in 2nd coding round.
Interview Questions (6)
Given logs, find out the time taken by each function, including both inclusive and exclusive times.
Find the Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) of a Binary Search Tree.
Merge two B+ trees.
Apply Dijkstra's Algorithm, initially for unit distance edges, and then extending to weighted edges.
Design a Key-Value Store. Discuss Functional Requirements (FR) and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR).