real interview stories, told over a cup of tea ♡
LinkedIn Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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26 results
- Debugging Logistic Regression, Then Job Click Prediction DesignLinkedIn · Machine Learning Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
The first part was 30 minutes of debugging a logistic regression implementation. I spent too much time on the sigmoid derivative at the start, so I didn't finish the last step, computing the gradients. Then came 20 minutes of ML design: Predict whether a member will click on a displayed job using member features, job content, and interaction history. I had to define everything myself: what data i…
- Five Back-to-Back Rounds After a Layoff, Offer Within WeeksLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2026Offer
A layoff recently pushed me to start job hunting. A LinkedIn recruiter reached out in the second week of August. The phone screen happened the week after that. About a week later I got a call to set up the next stage, and the recruiter gave me two weeks to get ready for the full loop. They offered either a virtual or an in-person loop and I went virtual. I would have liked a gap of two or three d…
- Phone Screen with Two Easy Questions, Onsite Invite a Week LaterLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Oct 2026In progress
I mass-applied to a position at the end of September, and also asked a person or two for referrals. The strange thing is that the referrals all went nowhere, and the one I applied to cold is the one that moved forward to an interview. The interviewer was pretty laid-back, maybe it's the company culture. They asked me what times I could interview, then disappeared for three or four days. Eventuall…
- A Five-Round IC2 Loop With an AI/Coding RoundLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026
Elimination Round Maximum Depth of Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal Round 1 – DSA Max Points on a Line / Max Collinear Points Minimum Length Substring Round 2 – AI + Coding LRU Cache with Counters Given different workloads, predict and calculate the cache's hit/miss ratio. This round required combining coding with reasoning about AI/system behavior. Round 3 – Hiring Manager Behavioral int…
- An Ambiguous Recommender Training TaskLinkedIn · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
This was a very strange interview experience. It was the interviewer's first time interviewing, and she asked me to handwrite a binary-classification machine learning loader and trainer. The data was not a real dataset, so I could not write code that would actually run. She asked for pseudocode but did not explain what level of detail she wanted. She also did not clarify what the model was suppos…
- Five Onsite Rounds from Course Data to ExperimentationLinkedIn · Data Scientist · Onsite · Sep 2026
My LinkedIn onsite had five rounds in total: Data presentation I was given two tables. One showed the current number of LinkedIn Learning courses in each category, and the other showed the number of courses and participants over time. I had to analyze them myself, then make slides and present. SQL + Python For SQL, I was given two experiment tables. One was a cohort table with users, their experi…
- Five Rounds, Failed AI Coding and System DesignLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Sep 2026Rejected
LinkedIn Senior Infra, five rounds. I failed AI Coding and System Design, so here are some lessons learned (I had AI polish this a bit). I recently finished the interview loop for a LinkedIn Senior Infra role and did not pass, mainly because of AI Coding and System Design. My memory is still fresh, so I'm sharing the questions and my own review, hoping it helps anyone preparing for Infra. Phone s…
- Interviewer Couldn't Follow My One-Pass DFS TrickLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
Two questions. The first was to merge an n-ary tree by key -- only nodes that share the same key get merged. It's solvable with DFS. Make sure to ask about the corner cases up front, like whether the root keys are even the same. The second question was similar in spirit. The interviewer completely did not understand this problem. I wrote out the following conversion formula, which lets you solve…
- Downleveled from Senior Staff, Four Rounds, Then SilenceLinkedIn · DevOps Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026No response
Back in February or March I applied for a senior staff role at LinkedIn, something pretty close to what I'm doing now. The first round was behavioral, and I've always felt I hadn't quite prepared it right — I leaned too hard on execution. I interviewed at Stripe recently too and got the same feedback. In the end they told me they wanted to downlevel me to staff. LinkedIn's senior staff, on levels…
- Failed the System Design Round, One-Year CooldownLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
Coding: LeetCode "Deadpool" and 272. SD: Post Search. The deep dive mostly focused on how to quickly figure out which posts contain a keyword, how to implement excluding a keyword (for example, a post must contain apple but must not contain banana), and how to rank the returned post results by keyword frequency. AI Coding: a roller coaster passenger-seating problem. You are given how many seats a…
- Two of Four AI-Coding Tasks CompletedLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
I just received a rejection. The feedback was reportedly that the AI-coding round had four tasks and I had only completed two. I'd like to ask everyone, especially people with experience inside LinkedIn: what exactly is expected in this kind of AI-coding interview? Was I led down the wrong path? First round: System design. Design a system to collect user activity, with queries for the last minute…
- Two Optimal Solutions in a 60-Minute ScreenLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
The technical phone screen lasted 60 minutes. There were two interviewers, and both were relaxed and friendly. One was shadowing, while the other led the interview. After a brief introduction, the lead interviewer asked about a project on my resume and went straight into its details. The two coding questions were LeetCode 179, Largest Number, and LeetCode 244, Shortest Word Distance II. For both…
- Weird Phone Screen with BQs, Array Sum Coding and InMail System DesignLinkedIn · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
Sharing a pretty weird LinkedIn phone screen. A recruiter reached out in early September and set up a 20-minute call. We briefly talked about my background, the target role and salary, and then the phone screen got scheduled. Phone screen: 1 hour. It started with about 5 minutes of intro. I got interrupted before I even finished my self-introduction. Overall it felt like the interviewer wasn't ve…
- Account Executive interview at LinkedIn: elevator-pitch finaleLinkedIn · Account Executive · Jul 2026Offer
After recruiter contact, I had three interviews with HR and several team members, including an Account Executive and a manager. The early conversations were casual and conversational, while the second round became a more direct Q&A. For the final stage, I had to give an elevator pitch and present. It seemed designed to test whether I could organize a message and communicate it clearly in the mome…
- LinkedIn Account Executive interview: fast recruiter-to-mock-call loopLinkedIn · Account Executive · HR Screen · Jul 2026Offer
The recruiter conversation was quick and friendly, and the process moved fast. Within minutes of applying, I received an email to schedule the first screening call. I spoke with three people in total: a recruiter, a hiring manager, and a panel-style mock call. The hiring team was great throughout. I answered their questions and felt they were listening. By the end of the last round, I had receive…
- Product Manager interview at LinkedIn: compressed virtual loopLinkedIn · Product Manager · Jul 2026
My virtual loop had five rounds with senior-director or director-level product people. Each was about 30 minutes, so the pace felt rushed and there was a lot to get through quickly. Most of the conversations were behavioral, followed by two product questions that served as a quick sense check. People were engaged, but the format left little room to explore nuance. I had expected more time to show…
- LinkedIn Software Engineer Interview: Notification-service design and an accepted offerLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jun 2026Offer
About a week after a recruiter call, I had a technical screen that surprised me with its intensity. It ran about 45 minutes and combined behavioral and technical questions. The technical work leaned toward system design: I had to reason through a notification-delivery service, including reliability and scaling, rather than just draw a high-level picture. The later interviews stayed rigorous, with…
- Five Rounds, No Hard Problems, All About DepthLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Onsite · May 2026
Five rounds, with my approach and follow-ups for each. I've been lurking on this forum for years, and this interview process benefited a lot from it, so I'm writing up a full account to give back. As usual, I'll use homophone code names for the problems in the original, but I'll just describe them directly here. Overall impressions first. LinkedIn's interview pace is fairly restrained — not like…
- Aced the Coding Round, Rejected the Next DayLinkedIn · Data Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Feb 2026Rejected
Unfortunately I got laid off by my old company a few weeks ago. Through a good friend's referral, I got an interview for a LinkedIn Staff Data Engineer - Information Security role. The interviewer was really friendly — the whole thing was very warm and supportive. The interview was an hour total. We started with some small talk, then he asked two questions: Tell me about a project you worked on,…
- Five-Round Onsite, Timezone Curveball in System DesignLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Feb 2026In progress
LinkedIn onsite interview experience, giving back to the community here. Some background first: I'm an SDE3 with 5 years of experience. I'd been grinding coding problems for a while, but my system design prep was just so-so. The whole onsite was five rounds, one hour each: Round 1 was a project deep dive. I talked through two projects, and the interviewer kept the conversation pretty natural, dig…
- Phone Screen Plus a Five-Round Onsite Full of Probability QuestionsLinkedIn · Machine Learning Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Feb 2026
The phone screen was 1hr, there was a lot of content, but it was all questions that had already shown up in other interview reports. Coding - biased coin Input: A method getRandom01Biased() that generates a random integer in [0, 1], where 0 is generated with probability p and 1 is generated with probability (1-p) Output: A method getRandom06Uniform() that generates a random integer in [0, 6] with…
- Product Sense, SQL, and a Pandas Group-By SlipLinkedIn · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
Interviewers: the main interviewer and a shadow interviewer, both very friendly. Question 1: Product Sense — how would you analyze a drop in traffic from the Home Page to the Profile Page? (20 mins) My approach: Start with a qualitative check: open LinkedIn's homepage myself to see if there's an obvious change or bug. For example, there was a recent user report that searching for someone's name s…
- Phone Screen to Full Onsite, Rejected on Code QualityLinkedIn · Software Engineer · Onsite · Oct 2025Rejected
Applied in a big October application wave. Interviewing for a junior role. Phone screen: 1 hour, and we spent the first 15 minutes just chatting about my resume. Question 1 was a variant of a problem I only had a coded name for — it started with just () parentheses, then the follow-up expanded it to three different types of brackets. We discussed a stack-based approach versus one using a counter,…
- A Technical Screen Packed with Stats QuestionsLinkedIn · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
No guarantee the answers here are correct, just for reference! LinkedIn Stats One bank has 5 tellers and a single line, another bank has 5 tellers with 5 separate lines — which one would you queue at? Simple statistical explanation: the "Long Plank Effect" (the opposite of the Weakest Link Effect). In a single queue, your waiting time is determined by the fastest available teller. In multiple que…
- Onsite Undone by a Key-Value Store System Design QuestionLinkedIn · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Jul 2025In progress
LinkedIn, AI track. I passed the technical screen before the layoffs, and it didn't get scheduled for onsite until this week. The hiring manager round is scheduled for before National Day — nothing much to say about that yet. After preparing for so long I was actually pretty confident, but today one of the system design rounds completely wrecked me. I'm not fully willing to accept that, but I'm s…
- Statistics and Case-Study Questions from the Screening RoundLinkedIn · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jul 2025
I can't guarantee these answers are 100% correct — take them as reference only! LinkedIn Stats One bank has 5 tellers and a single line; another bank has 5 tellers but 5 separate lines. Which one would you stand in? Simple statistical explanation: the "long plank effect" (the opposite of the weakest-link effect). In a single queue, your waiting time is determined by the fastest available teller.…
