I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at LinkedIn in May 2011
Interview
Had 3 phone interviews:
1) Usual stuff with technical recruiter.
2) Sales pitch and broad questions about my experiences with the hiring manager.
3) Tech Screen over collabedit.com with a random engineer who, after the usual questions, asked to code a generic (String key, Object value) LRU cache in 35 minutes. I spent almost all the time designing. I did not feel that the problem was appropriate for a phone interview.
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 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
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.