LinkedIn Software Engineer Interview Questions
558+ questions from real LinkedIn Software Engineer interviews, reported by candidates.
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LinkedIn Phone Screen
Given a standard binary tree, print the maximum value in each possible path from the root of the tree to the leaf as a list Any approach or similar question?
LinkedIn Phone Screen
Interview started with introduction and background and explain about the most interesting project and challenges faced. Location : Sunnyvale. Then 2 coding questions https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-parentheses/ (With some integers and special characters also as part...
LinkedIn Phone Screen
A variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/can-place-flowers/ 2. https://leetcode.com/problems/search-in-rotated-sorted-array/ then https://leetcode.com/problems/search-in-rotated-sorted-array-ii/ as a follow up Did pretty well with optimized solutions. So I am hopeful about onsite. Edit: Moved to onsite. Recruiter let me know...
B.Tech - NIT Years of Experience: 2.5 yearsCurrent Role: Software Engineer at a FAANG-level company How did I apply? The recruiter directly reached out to me on LinkedIn. I was given an Online...
Hi everyone, I recently appeared for LinkedIn\u2019s Online Assessment (OA) and Phone Screen for the Software Engineer - Applications role. Below are the questions I was asked during the phone screen. https://leetcode.com/problems/find-leaves-of-binary-tree/description/ https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-word-distance-ii/description/ Is...
Linkedin OA
You have just arrived in a new city and would like to see its sights. Each sight is located in a square and you have assigned each a beauty value....
Telephone screen round Started with a brief Introduction Asked to draw an HLD of the current services you\u2019re working upon - TPS in each service - Queuing write semantics - DB consistency levels - Authorization...
Status: 7 years of experience in a Product company Location: Bangalore Date: May 2022 All rounds were of 1 hour duration Technical phone screen: 1. https://leetcode.com/problems/sqrtx/ 2. https://leetcode.com/problems/nested-list-weight-sum-ii/ Onsite Rounds: Round 1: Coding 1. variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/insert-delete-getrandom-o1/ 2. https://leetcode.com/problems/find-the-celebrity/ **Round 2:...
LinedIn coding interview experience
I was asked two question. Do comment if you have a good solution 1) Given a matrix of following relationships between N LinkedIn users (with ids from 0 to N-1): followingMatrix[i][j]...
Reverse a String
## Problem Given a string `s`, reverse it and return the reversed string. ## Input - One line string `s`. ## Output - Print the reversed string. ## Constraints - `0 <= len(s) <= 10^5` - The string
Implement LRU Cache
Design and implement a data structure for LRU (Least Recently Used) cache. It should support the following operations: get and put. get(key) - Get the value (will always be positive) of the key if the
Sharing my recent interview experience for a Software Engineer role at LinkedIn. Hope this helps others preparing for similar roles. ### Screening Round First 30 mins : Deep dive into past projects Se
LinkedIn SWE IC2 Infra Phone Screening Experience
Hey guys, I just went through the initial screening round. 1. Project deep dive (wanted to understand under how much scale I have worked) 2. Few CS fundamentals - Java basics - Process vs Threads 3. O
LinkedIn Software Engineer Infrastructure Interview Experience and Rejection
Hi everyone, Recently got interviewed at LinkedIn for Software Engg. Infrastructure role. ## Background YOE - 3.6 years (Backend engineer, Java, Spring boot) ## Screening Round This round consisted of
I recently interviewed for a Senior Software Engineer position at LinkedIn. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to the next round, but I wanted to share the questions and my experience to help others prep
LinkedIn Senior Software Engineer SSE Infrastructure Team Interview
Month of Interview : Feb 2026 YOE : 4 years I recently got the opportunity to interview for a SSE role at LinkedIn and felt like sharing the interview experience. # Phone Screen Round - Past projects
This was a pretty tough but a smooth round for me, where I was given a string manipulation based question, I had to compress and decompress the given string. It was LZ78 based question. /* LZ78 is a w
This was 2nd round of DSA with LinkedIn. Duration - 60 mins Number of Questions - 2 1. Max consecutive 1's in circular format. https://leetcode.com/problems/max-consecutive-ones-ii/description/ replac
LinkedIn SWE IC2 System Design Interview Experience
System design round at LinkedIn. It focuses on both HLD and LLd. Duration - 60 mins. question - Design a metric collection and querying system. The system will both collect metrics from a large fleet
LinkedIn Software Engineer Phone Screen: Weighted GetRandom Variation
Hi, got an interesting question in Phone screen interview. Hopefully it will help someone. Trying to share the idea of the question. the actual language might be different in the question. Linked has
What LinkedIn Looks for in Software Engineer Interviews
LinkedIn Software Engineer interviews are calibrated against the level and scope expected of the role. Across 558+ verified candidate reports on LeakCode, the consistent signals interviewers look for: clear problem decomposition before coding, explicit complexity reasoning, structured handling of edge cases, and the ability to articulate trade-offs between two reasonable approaches.
The discriminator between candidates who advance and candidates who do not is rarely the final correctness of the solution. It is the path to the solution: did you ask clarifying questions, did you state your approach before coding, did you handle edge cases without prompting, and did you communicate your reasoning throughout. Reports tagged "no hire" frequently cite a working solution with poor communication; reports tagged "strong hire" cite clear thinking even when the final solution was incomplete.
How To Use This Question Set
Real interview reports are a calibration tool, not a memorization target. Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months; memorizing exact problems risks misleading you when the interviewer uses a variant. The high-leverage use: identify the patterns that appear repeatedly in LinkedIn Software Engineer reports, practice those patterns on similar (not identical) problems, and use the reports to understand the interviewer's typical follow-up depth.
Filter the questions below by round type, difficulty, and recency. Focus first on reports from the past 6-12 months; older reports may reference questions that have since rotated out of LinkedIn's pool. Reports tagged with quantified difficulty (e.g., "medium-hard") are higher-signal than reports without difficulty tags.
Round-by-Round Expectations
LinkedIn Software Engineer loops typically span 4-6 rounds across phone screens and on-site or virtual on-site interviews. The structure varies by company: some run 1 recruiter screen + 1 technical phone + 3-4 on-site rounds; others run 1 recruiter screen + 1 OA + 4-5 on-site rounds. The recruiter screen is logistics and culture-light; the technical phone screen is medium-difficulty coding; the on-site loop covers coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral rounds.
Each round is designed to surface a specific signal. Coding rounds: correctness, code quality, complexity reasoning, communication. System design rounds: requirements clarification, design judgment, operational thinking. Behavioral rounds: ownership scope, leadership, ambiguity tolerance, conflict navigation. Strong candidates explicitly hit each signal dimension out loud during the round; weak candidates focus only on solving the prompt.
Common Interview Mistakes At This Combination
Reports tagged "no hire" at LinkedIn Software Engineer commonly cite: jumping into code without clarifying requirements, coding silently for 10+ minutes without verbalizing approach, missing edge cases (empty input, single element, very large input, overflow), and producing a working solution that the candidate cannot explain or refactor when probed. Strong candidates avoid these patterns by following a consistent template: clarify, verbalize approach, code with narration, test with examples.
Behavioral and design rounds have their own failure modes. Behavioral: stories that use "we" instead of "I" diluting individual signal, stories with no quantified outcome, defensiveness when probed about failure. Design: not asking clarifying questions, not stating requirements out loud, designing for a single server when the prompt clearly implies scale, ignoring operational concerns (deployment, monitoring, rollback). These show up in roughly half of LinkedIn Software Engineer interview retrospectives on LeakCode.
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