LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
Apr 2026
LinkedIn SWE coding round, one problem the whole time. It's a phone keypad / dictionary lookup thing, basically LeetCode 17 but with a word list constraint. Felt manageable once I figured out the pruning angle.
- Given a string of digits (2-9), where each digit maps to letters like a phone keypad, and a dictionary of valid words, return all letter combinations of the digit string that appear in the dictionary.
“I started with the naive backtracking approach, generate every combination then filter against a set.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at LinkedIn, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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