Interview Experiences

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

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17 stories

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LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Nov 2026

LinkedIn Software Engineer Systems and Infrastructure Role Phone Screen 1 Round

Interview Structure The first 5 minutes were spent on introductions between the two interviewers and me. Operating Systems and Computer Science Fundamentals The interviewer started with a rapid-fire round of OS and computer science fundamentals. Questions covered: What is a page, virtual memory, and a page fault? What is thrashing? What are mutexes and semaphores? Binary semaphore vs. mutex: What…

Technical Screen1
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
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
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
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
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
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

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OfferOnsiteXP0
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
LinkedInSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

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

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RejectedOnsiteXP0
LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Dec 2025

Live Coding Plus an AI Pair-Programming Round

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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
LinkedInSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2025

Five-Round Virtual Onsite Undone by a System Design Question

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RejectedOnsiteXP0

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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