I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Sep 2018
Interview
I had a phone round where I was asked a few Java concepts followed by three coding exercises. The call lasted for an hour and the interviewer was nice to speak to. I later had an onsite interview with 6 rounds, of which 3 were system design and 2 coding questions. The process is exhausting as it takes 7 hours at a stretch including the lunch round. Most of the engineers were nice to speak to except for a couple of them. One Senior Engineer who asked me a system design question had a set answer in his mind and wanted me to come to that which I found annoying even though my approach was as good as his which he eventually agreed to. One of the coding round was with a junior engineer and he lacked experience which was clearly visible because he wasn't able to follow my code and also his instructions were contrasting from the beginning of the interview to the one at the end.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding round was to implement a HashMap with primitives and find all the palindromic subsequence. System design rounds I would were specific to LinkedIn.
The interview process started with a screening round featuring one LeetCode medium problem and an SQL challenge. This was followed by a comprehensive onsite with five rounds: a LeetCode coding challenge, an SQL assessment, a system design interview, a hiring manager conversation to evaluate cultural fit, and finally a team matching phase to find the right team.
Interviewed for an SDE role. The process was well-organized and the recruiters were responsive throughout. That said, the technical rounds were significantly more challenging than expected — definitely come prepared to go deep. Overall a valuable experience regardless of the outcome.
That was a real stroke of luck — when I got to the coding round and encountered a question on finding the maximum subarray sum, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com a few days earlier. The interview kicked off with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone interview. It was intense, especially with the focus on algorithms and data structures. I also faced some behavioral questions that challenged my experience. After a final onsite round, I received an offer and happily accepted. Overall, it was tough but rewarding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an integer array nums, find the contiguous subarray (containing at least one number) which has the largest sum and return its sum. Walk through Kadane's algorithm and explain the O(n) approach.