I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Apr 2017
Interview
HR Phone screen where I talked to the recruiter about my background, nothing special. Then Followed by Phone Technical Interview. Didn't get to pass this one. I regret not asking for more clarification questions about the second problem.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
1. You have n doors in a row that are all initially closed. You make n passes by the doors starting with the first door every time. The first time through you visit every door and toggle the door (if the door is closed, you open it, if its open, you close it). the second time you only visit every 2nd door (door #2, #4, #6. third pass you toggle 3rd, 6th, 9th door.
What state are the doors in after the last pass? which doors are open ?
2.
/**
* A tournament tree is a binary tree
* where the parent is the minimum of the two children.
* Given a tournament tree find the second minimum value in the tree.
* A node in the tree will always have 2 or 0 children.
* Also all leaves will have distinct and unique values.
* 2
* / \
* 2 3
* / \ | \
* 4 2 5 3
*
* In this given tree the answer is 3.
*/
class Node {
Integer value;
Node left, right;
Node(Integer value, Node left, Node right) {
this.value = value;
this.left = left;
this.right = right;
}
}
class Solution {
/**
* This should return the second minimum
* int value in the given tournament tree
*/
public static Integer secondMin(Node root) {
}
}
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 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.
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