LinkedIn Interview Questions — Page 7

LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2026

LinkedIn software engineering interview with two main prompts: a deep project walkthrough on the whiteboard and a reflection on team dysfunction. Pretty standard for this type of round but the team reflection question had more depth to it than I expected.

Walk me through a past project end-to-end. Cover the architecture, the trade-offs you made, and what your specific contributions were.
What problems did you notice in your previous team around process, collaboration, or code quality? If you were a junior engineer, how would you actually go about changing things?

“This is the kind of question that feels easy until you're actually at the whiteboard and realize your mental model of your own project is fuzzier than you thought.”

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LinkedIn·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026

One product sense question about fake review detection, framed as a Yelp PM scenario but asked in a LinkedIn interview. Short and focused, no behavioral rounds from what I could tell.

You're a PM at Yelp. How would you build a system to detect fake reviews?

“I started with signals I could actually defend: review velocity spikes, account age, reviewer history, linguistic patterns.”

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LinkedIn·AI Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

LinkedIn AI Engineer interview that was basically one meaty coding problem about building a priority queue from the ground up. No library shortcuts allowed, which made it more interesting than I expected.

Implement a priority queue from scratch without using any built-in heap libraries. Your implementation should support push, pop (returning and removing the highest-priority element), and peek, with O(log n) and O(1) complexity respectively. Back it with an array-based binary heap and implement sift-up and sift-down. Also discuss min-heap vs max-heap and how you'd handle custom comparators.

“The 'no built-in heap' constraint is what made this non-trivial.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

LinkedIn system design round for a software engineer role. The whole thing was basically one big question about building a type-ahead suggestion service, and they went deep on every layer of it.

Design an auto-complete / type-ahead suggestion service that returns the top 5 relevant completions as a user types a prefix, with low latency.
How would you shard the index for this service, and what are the trade-offs of sharding by prefix?
How does your system handle new or trending queries that aren't yet in the index?
How would you add typo tolerance or fuzzy matching to the suggestions?
What are the trade-offs between serving personalized suggestions versus a global top-K list?

“This question sprawled in every direction.”

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LinkedIn·AI Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

LinkedIn AI Engineer interview with a coding problem that looks like a simple math puzzle but actually requires you to know your median proofs cold. One question, pretty focused session.

N people are standing at various positions on a 1-D number line. Find a meeting point that minimizes the total sum of absolute distances from each person to that point. Prove why your chosen point is optimal and implement the solution.

“I knew the answer was the median basically immediately, but the proof part is where I fumbled a bit.”

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LinkedIn·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

LinkedIn data scientist interview with a meaty stratified A/B testing problem. The whole session was basically one long question that kept branching into follow-ups about Simpson's paradox and Mantel-Haenszel, which I was not fully prepared for.

You ran a stratified email A/B test across two weeks and two cities. Compute stratum-specific conversion rates and 95% confidence intervals for each variant in each stratum.
Use a Mantel-Haenszel estimate to test for a common treatment effect across strata. Report the common odds ratio, its 95% CI, and the two-sided p-value.
Test for effect heterogeneity across strata using a Breslow-Day test or equivalent interaction test. What does the result tell you?
Compute the naive pooled conversion rates ignoring stratification. Does Simpson's paradox appear here, and why?
Make a final recommendation: which email variant should you go with, and how do you reconcile the stratified analysis with the naive pooled result?

“This part felt manageable.”

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LinkedIn·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026

LinkedIn PM interview, one question about Responsible AI and how it ties into customer trust. Pretty conceptual but not as soft as it sounds once you're actually in it.

What Responsible AI considerations matter most when it comes to building and keeping customer trust in your products?

“I went straight to bias and transparency because those felt safe, but then I realized I was just listing things without connecting them to actual trust mechanics.”

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LinkedIn·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

LinkedIn ML Engineer system design round, focused entirely on building a metrics monitoring platform from scratch. The scope was broader than I expected and I felt like I was playing catch-up the whole time.

Design a metrics monitoring system for large-scale services. Walk through the full end-to-end architecture.
Compare push vs pull models for metrics collection. When would you choose one over the other, and what are the tradeoffs around reliability, backpressure, service discovery, and failure isolation?
What aggregation and rollup strategies would you use, and where would you apply them: client side, agent side, stream processing, or storage side?
How would you handle high-cardinality labels, downsampling, late or out-of-order data, retention policies, and backfill in a time-series database?
How would you capacity plan this system, including sharding, replication, and multi-tenant isolation?
How would you test and monitor the monitoring system itself?

“I started with the ingestion layer and worked forward, which in hindsight was the wrong order.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

LinkedIn SWE coding round, one main problem with a couple of follow-ups tacked on at the end. The core question was a classic array traversal thing but the follow-ups pushed into territory I wasn't totally prepared for.

You're given a binary array where 1 means a slot is occupied and 0 means it's free. Given a number n, can you place n more items into the free slots such that no two new items are adjacent to each other or to any already-occupied slot?
What if each item you're placing has a width greater than 1 instead of occupying a single slot?
How would your approach change if the adjacency rule was relaxed so that items can be placed next to each other?

“I recognized the pattern pretty quickly, which was a relief.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Got a technical screen at LinkedIn with a networking fundamentals question. Pretty short, not much to it.

What components make up a web server request?

“Ran through the basics: method, URL, headers, body.”

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