Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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35 stories

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LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Reported Oct 2026

Five Back-to-Back Rounds After a Layoff, Offer Within Weeks

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…

OfferOnsite0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Phone Screen with Two Easy Questions, Onsite Invite a Week Later

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…

In progressTechnical Screen0
LinkedInMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

Debugging Logistic Regression, Then Job Click Prediction Design

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…

Technical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Five Rounds, Failed AI Coding and System Design

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…

RejectedOnsite0
LinkedInData Scientist
Sep 2026

Five Onsite Rounds from Course Data to Experimentation

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…

Onsite0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Interviewer Couldn't Follow My One-Pass DFS Trick

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Five-Round IC2 Loop With an AI/Coding Round

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…

Onsite0
LinkedInMachine Learning Engineer
Sep 2026

An Ambiguous Recommender Training Task

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…

RejectedTechnical Screen1
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two of Four AI-Coding Tasks Completed

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…

RejectedOnsite0
LinkedInMachine Learning Engineer
Aug 2026

Weird Phone Screen with BQs, Array Sum Coding and InMail System Design

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…

In progressTechnical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Two Optimal Solutions in a 60-Minute Screen

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…

Technical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Failed the System Design Round, One-Year Cooldown

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…

RejectedOnsite0
LinkedInDevOps EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Downleveled from Senior Staff, Four Rounds, Then Silence

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…

No responseOnsite0
LinkedInAccount Executive
Reported Jul 2026

LinkedIn Account Executive interview: fast recruiter-to-mock-call loop

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…

OfferHR Screen0
LinkedInProduct Manager
Reported Jul 2026

Product Manager interview at LinkedIn: compressed virtual loop

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…

0
LinkedInAccount Executive
Reported Jul 2026

Account Executive interview at LinkedIn: elevator-pitch finale

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…

Offer0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Reported Jun 2026

LinkedIn Software Engineer Interview: Notification-service design and an accepted offer

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…

OfferTechnical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Five Rounds, No Hard Problems, All About Depth

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…

Onsite0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Mar 2026

Six Rounds Promised, Five Delivered, After Weeks of Silence

Locked — open it to unlock the full story with XP.

OfferOnsiteXP0
LinkedInMachine Learning EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Phone Screen Plus a Five-Round Onsite Full of Probability Questions

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…

Onsite0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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