LinkedIn HR reached out and said my background was a good fit; after an HR call, I moved into the interview process.
The Phone Screen was an Easy coding question plus a follow-up — string matching.
After passing the Phone Screen, I had a 30-minute informal chat with the Hiring Manager, mostly about the team's work and my own experience. After that, HR reached out to schedule the Loop Interview. The Loop was originally planned as two 1-hour coding rounds, one 75-minute System Design + Domain Knowledge round, and one 45-minute Hiring Manager round. Then, a week before the Loop, HR told me it had changed to one coding round, one SD round, one HM round, and a separate 1-hour Domain Knowledge round... I couldn't find a similar interview format on the forum.
HM round: a quick round of behavioral questions, about six or seven of them.
SD: design a Notification System. I felt like I hadn't really prepared for this area, so I had to work through it on the spot.
Coding: the classic DashMart question, solved with BFS. I ran out of time on the follow-up and only got out a rough approach. Domain Knowledge: a deep dive into one of my own projects — I had to draw out a design/architecture diagram just like in the SD round, and then they asked a lot of questions beyond what was on my resume. Since my day-to-day work hadn't touched that area, I could only answer what I actually knew.
I did the first three rounds on Friday, then the last round — Domain Knowledge — on Monday afternoon, and got the rejection email on Tuesday afternoon. The whole process was very efficient and the interview experience was good overall, but in the end I got rejected. I later found out that the position HR had matched me to required at least 5 years of experience, but I only have 3. I thought I was interviewing for E4, and I'm not even sure...
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