I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Jan 2017
Interview
Standard hiring process same as other big tech. companies. First got a phone call from recruiter that explained me what the role was for. Then two 1 hour phone screens: 1st Behavioral and the 2nd Coding interview using collabedit.
2 days after the phone screen I got an email from the recruiter that hiring committee decided not to continue with the on-sit interview round.
Although both phone screens went well, here are the reasons why I am rating this as a negative experience:
1. First interviewer (Behavioral) was 10 minutes late. I had to email the recruiter after I waited for him on BlueJeans for 10 minutes. The interview went well overall. It appeared he was happy with the answers and the background / experience I have.
2. Second interviewer (Coding) was 15 minutes late. The interviewer was constantly coughing throughout the interview. Even though this was a "Staff Software Engineer" interview she asked me a question related to "RAID." Still can't figure out the reason for it. But I was able to answer that question fairly easily as I do have good knowledge of not only Software Engineering but IT infrastructure management and related concerns as well. Then she asked me a few questions about threads, processes and mutex -- all fine and went well. Then she asked me to implement a blocking queue in collebedit. My primary language is C# and the recruiter did say it will just be fine as long as I can use any of these languages: Java, C# or C++. I asked her if I can use C#. She said no since she didn't have an answer for the coding exercise in C#. Even then, I completed the exercise in Java and the solution I implemented was technically pretty sound and that was confirmed by the interviewer. However, I was not given additional 15 minutes to work on the edge cases (even though, it was the interviewer who came in late) or improve the design.
So if the hiring committee made a decision based on this, that would be really unfortunate and injustice actually.
I did reached out to the recruiter asking the reason and also when I can re-apply. Did not get any response from them. I was expecting more from LinkedIn than this in terms of both professionalism and conducting fair interviews.
Note: I have more than 12 years of leadership and hands-on architecture / engineering experience in the Software industry and have worked on many truly enterprise scale projects used by many Fortune 500 and Government entities.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lot of questions related to my previous jobs / experiences. Here are the questions from the coding phone screen: What is RAID? What is a difference between a Thread and a Process? What is Mutex? Implement a thread-safe BlockingQueue in Java.
Recruiter emailed me for exploring interview. Then, I was invited to a phone screening interview.
I was asked to implement LFU similar data structure. I've never implemented that before. I've done with LRU though. It was very difficult to me to come up with appropriate solution on site.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
LFU-like question was asked, which was very difficult for me to solve.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn in Jul 2025
Interview
3 DSA rounds ( leetcode hard ) + 2 system design rounds + 1 managerial round focussed on projects and behavioural questions. Process was well organised in terms of scheduling.
The interviewers seemed rigid in evaluating candidates by narrow checklists rather than engineering depth. Feedback reflected a bias towards specific solution paths - even when alternate valid approaches were discussed clearly and with tradeoffs.
The interview culture also gave little space for collaborative discussion; it felt more like evaluative than explorative, especially in architecture rounds. I was also penalised for choosing a simple, scalable design before incrementally adding complexity.
Advice to Management"
Staff+ roles demand open mindedness and an appreciation for diverse design perspectives. Encourage interviewers to listen with curiosity rather than just matching against predefined answers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode hard questions and couple of system design questions
Get contacted for a Silicon Valley position, finished screening and onsite (5 rounds). Have not heard back from anybody after 25 days, even after I followed up with the recruiter at the 14 day mark.
