Interview Experiences

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

Share yours, earn XP

25 stories

Likes earn the author +10 XP for the first 3 likes each day

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 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
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
LinkedInData Scientist
Feb 2026

Every Stats Question From the Technical Screen

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

Technical ScreenXP0
LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Five-Round Onsite, Timezone Curveball in System Design

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…

In progressOnsite0
LinkedInMachine Learning Engineer
Feb 2026

Two Coding Rounds, an ML Foundations Deep Dive, and a LinkedIn Skills Design Question

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

In progressOnsiteXP0
LinkedInData EngineerSenior+
Feb 2026

Aced the Coding Round, Rejected the Next Day

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,…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
LinkedInData Scientist
Jan 2026

Product Sense, SQL, and Python in One Screen

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

Technical ScreenXP0
LinkedInData Scientist
Jan 2026

Product Sense, SQL, and a Rushed Pandas GROUP BY

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

Technical ScreenXP0
LinkedInData Scientist
Jan 2026

Product Sense, SQL, and a Pandas Group-By Slip

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…

Technical Screen0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Onsite With an AI Debugging Round and a Week-Later Rejection

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

RejectedOnsiteXP0
LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Dec 2025

Live Coding Plus an AI Pair-Programming Round

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

OnsiteXP0
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Oct 2025

Phone Screen to Full Onsite, Rejected on Code Quality

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,…

RejectedOnsite0

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.

Share your experience to earn XP