LinkedIn interview notes, page 28 of 32

Large Enterprises

Most of these LinkedIn write-ups come from Software Engineers (156), then Product Managers (66) and Data Scientists (37). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (169), the product sense round (62), the system design round (42) and the behavioral / leadership round (20).

316 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

LinkedIn software engineer coding round with three questions, escalating in difficulty. The first was a warmup, the second was classic Kadane's, and the third tripped me up more than I expected.

Write a function to reverse a string.
Given an integer array that may contain negative numbers, find the maximum sum of any non-empty contiguous subarray.
Given an integer array that may contain negative numbers and zeros, find the maximum product of any non-empty contiguous subarray.

“Pure warmup.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Product Manager·Recruiter / HR Screen

Jun 2026

Short LinkedIn PM screen, basically just one question about motivation for the role.

Why do you want to work at LinkedIn?

“Gave the usual answer about the professional network mission and how it connects to my background.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

LinkedIn system design question focused on dependency propagation across services. Pretty niche problem, the kind where you either see it immediately or you're drawing boxes on a whiteboard hoping something clicks.

Given a set of services where each service declares what data it reads from and writes to, forming a producer-consumer dependency chain, and given a list of deleted data paths, identify all affected services in propagation order (i.e., transitively downstream from each deleted path).

“I knew this was a graph traversal problem pretty fast, but I fumbled on the transitive part for longer than I'd like to admit.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

LinkedIn SWE interview with a pretty involved BST problem that had a lot of moving parts. The core question was straightforward to state but the complexity constraints made it genuinely tricky to nail down cleanly.

Given a BST with n nodes and a real-valued target t, find k node values closest to t. Your solution must run in O(log n + k) expected time and use only O(h) extra space where h is the tree height. You can use predecessor/successor iterators backed by in-order stacks, or a recursive approach. Also handle tie-breaking, the case where k > n, and duplicate values.
How would you adapt your solution if the tree were a general binary tree instead of a BST? What changes in terms of approach and complexity guarantees?

“This one took me a minute to even parse.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

LinkedIn SWE coding round, pretty much one meaty design-your-own-data-structure problem. The question sounds straightforward until you actually think through the getRandom constraint.

Design a data structure that supports insert, remove, and getRandom operations all in average O(1) time, where getRandom returns each element with equal probability.

“The insert and remove parts felt manageable but getRandom is where it gets tricky.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026

LinkedIn PM interview, one question that sounds deceptively simple but actually requires you to have thought through this stuff before. No fluff, just a pretty direct strategy question.

How do you decide whether a problem calls for AI, generative AI, an agent-based system, traditional software, or a simple rules-based approach?

“I fumbled this a bit at first because I started listing use cases instead of talking about the decision criteria.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Data Scientist·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026

LinkedIn senior/tech-lead data scientist loop, all behavioral. Four prompts, all requiring real stories with real numbers. The whole thing felt like a deep audit of your resume more than a conversation.

Tell me about a time you led or mentored a team through an ambiguous project. How did you set direction, divide up the work, track progress, handle disagreements, and support people with less experience?
Describe a time you improved the quality of a product or model. How did you define what 'quality' even meant, pick the right metrics, find the root cause of problems, decide what to fix first, and verify it actually worked?
Walk me through a project you shipped that had clear, measurable business impact. How did you get stakeholders aligned, figure out the right scope to start with, navigate trade-offs, and demonstrate impact after launch?
Deep dive on your resume: specifically around what you personally owned, the decisions you made, how you influenced people outside your team, and what results you can directly attribute to your work.

“This one is deceptively broad.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Mobile Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

LinkedIn mobile engineer screen, about ten minutes focused entirely on iOS memory management. Pretty narrow scope but they went deep fast.

How does ARC work, and how is it different from garbage collection?
Walk me through strong, weak, and unowned references and when you'd choose each.
How do retain cycles form, and what are the main patterns you use to break them?
What are autorelease pools and when would you actually use one in modern iOS code?
What tools do you use to find memory leaks and how do you approach diagnosing them?

“Started okay, explained retain counts going to zero and deallocation happening synchronously.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

LinkedIn software engineering interview that leaned heavily into OOP fundamentals, specifically around how Java structures nested and inner classes. Felt more academic than I expected for this level, but the cross-language comparison piece is what actually tripped me up.

What is an object in object-oriented programming?
When would you use an inner class? Give a concrete example.
Walk through the differences between static nested classes, non-static member inner classes, local classes, and anonymous inner classes in Java. What are the practical tradeoffs of each?
How do analogous patterns in other languages like Python or C++ compare to Java's inner class model?

“Seemed like a warmup but I overthought it and gave some rambling answer about state and behavior.”

View Post

LinkedIn·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jul 2026

LinkedIn product sense round, just one question about measuring success for their events feature. Pretty short session from what I can tell, no frills.

How would you measure success for LinkedIn Events?

“I went straight for engagement metrics and kind of forgot to set up what 'success' even means for this feature before diving in.”

View Post