I applied through an employee referral. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (San Francisco, CA) in Jan 2020
Interview
2 hrs phone interview and the onsite interviews. I gave it twice.. first time was decently good experience, second time was the worst interview experience of my life. Hard to believe plain luck matters the most - Best of luck to the readers..
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Interviewer forgot the question he wanted to ask.. then he tried to make statement about the question using wrong words.. The question he asked was - Create a mirror reflection of binary tree - for that he asked - "do I know what is a symmetric tree" I explained him what is symmetric tree and how I can check symmetric tree. Interviewer realized this is not the question he wanted to ask then he asked lets create symmetric (mirror) reflection of a tree. I wrote the code to create mirror reflection of the tree.. I think he remembered the answer for "Invert a binary tree" and argued with me that my code to create a mirror will overwrite left node value and did not understand I am creating new tree (mirror tree) so there is no overwrite. It took 20 minutes of worthless conversation and the interviewer still did not get the simple code I wrote in 2 minutes. The interviewer was PhD - Sr. Staff with 20+ years of experience. I felt so miserable for my luck. I think that is why Google / Facebook still are the most reputed
Recruiter emailed me for exploring interview. Then, I was invited to a phone screening interview.
I was asked to implement LFU similar data structure. I've never implemented that before. I've done with LRU though. It was very difficult to me to come up with appropriate solution on site.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
LFU-like question was asked, which was very difficult for me to solve.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn in July 2025
Interview
3 DSA rounds ( leetcode hard ) + 2 system design rounds + 1 managerial round focussed on projects and behavioural questions. Process was well organised in terms of scheduling.
The interviewers seemed rigid in evaluating candidates by narrow checklists rather than engineering depth. Feedback reflected a bias towards specific solution paths - even when alternate valid approaches were discussed clearly and with tradeoffs.
The interview culture also gave little space for collaborative discussion; it felt more like evaluative than explorative, especially in architecture rounds. I was also penalised for choosing a simple, scalable design before incrementally adding complexity.
Advice to Management"
Staff+ roles demand open mindedness and an appreciation for diverse design perspectives. Encourage interviewers to listen with curiosity rather than just matching against predefined answers.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode hard questions and couple of system design questions
Get contacted for a Silicon Valley position, finished screening and onsite (5 rounds). Have not heard back from anybody after 25 days, even after I followed up with the recruiter at the 14 day mark.