LinkedIn Software Engineer interview questions

156 Software Engineers have shared notes from their LinkedIn interviews, with the questions they were asked in each round. That is 49% of the 316 LinkedIn interview notes on Screna AI.

156 Software Engineer interview notes

LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Sep 2026
LinkedIn SWE coding round where I got a tree problem, implemented a working iterative postorder traversal, and then spent the bulk of the interview in a back-and-forth about space complexity and a line-by-line dry run. Only finished one question total, which has me second-guessing how the round will be read.
  • Given a tree, return the nodes in the order they would be removed if you repeatedly removed all leaf nodes, grouping nodes by their height from the leaves.

“I went with an iterative postorder traversal using a stack where each frame tracked the node, a child iterator, and the max height seen so far among processed children.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
LinkedIn SWE interview with a linked list problem that sounds easy until you actually have to hit O(1) space. The question had a few wrinkles they pushed on pretty hard.
  • Given two singly linked lists that may share a common tail, find the first node where they intersect. Nodes are compared by reference. Aim for O(m+n) time and O(1) space. Walk through your approach, correctness reasoning, complexity analysis, and edge cases like empty lists, no intersection, or very different lengths.

“The length-difference trick clicked for me pretty fast: get both lengths, advance the pointer on the longer list by the difference, then walk both in sync until you hit the same node reference.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
LinkedIn software engineering interview with a coding question focused on string manipulation. Pretty standard technical screen but the edge case requirements made it more involved than I expected.
  • Write a function to check if a string is a palindrome after stripping out non-alphanumeric characters and ignoring case. Include time and space complexity analysis, and write tests that cover edge cases like special characters and Unicode input.

“I got the basic version down pretty fast but the Unicode part threw me off more than I'd like to admit.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
LinkedIn SWE interview with a nested list problem that looks straightforward until you realize the weights run backwards relative to depth. One question, but it had enough hidden complexity to keep me busy for a while.
  • Given a nested list of integers where each integer has a depth based on how many lists it's inside, compute the inverse-depth weighted sum. The weight of an integer at depth d is (max_depth - d + 1), so deeper integers get lower weight. Return the total weighted sum.

“My first instinct was to just do a DFS and track depth, which is fine, but I didn't immediately clock that you need the max depth before you can assign any weights.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
LinkedIn system design round where I had to walk through building a company-wide monitoring platform from scratch. Pretty open-ended, which sounds nice until you realize you have to structure it yourself. Covered a lot of ground across metrics, logs, and traces.
  • Design a company-wide monitoring system that supports metrics, logs, and distributed traces across many services and teams.
  • How would you handle high ingestion volume and prevent the pipeline from falling over under load?
  • What storage choices would you make for time series metrics versus logs, and how do they scale differently?
  • How do you design the alerting pipeline to stay reliable even when parts of the monitoring system itself are degraded?
  • How would you handle cardinality explosions in your metrics system, and what controls would you put in place?

“This is the kind of question where you can go in ten directions and none of them feel wrong, which is its own problem.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
LinkedIn SWE interview with a vehicle trip tracking problem. The question was cleaner than it looked at first but the edge cases are where they really want to see how you think.
  • Given a log of vehicle events (each with a license plate and an event type of ENTRY, ROAD, or EXIT), implement a function that counts the total number of completed trips across all vehicles, where a valid trip is exactly ENTRY followed by ROAD followed by EXIT in order.

“My first instinct was to just count sequences naively and I almost missed that the same plate can have multiple trips.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026
Behavioral round at LinkedIn for a software engineer role. Two questions, both pretty standard for senior-level loops but they still made me think harder than expected.
  • Tell me about a time you proposed a technical initiative and had to get your manager and other stakeholders on board. How did you build the case, push back on objections, and eventually get alignment?
  • How do you avoid becoming a single point of failure on your team? What concrete things do you actually do around documentation, knowledge sharing, and distributing ownership?

“This one I actually felt okay about.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
LinkedIn software engineer interview with a classic tree problem and a follow-up that actually made me think harder than the main question.
  • Given a binary tree, find the lowest common ancestor of two given nodes. Follow-up: how does your approach change if every node has a pointer to its parent?

“The base recursive solution came back to me pretty quickly.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026
Behavioral round at LinkedIn for a software engineer role. Four questions, all pretty standard but the coworker one tripped me up more than I expected.
  • What project are you most proud of, and why?
  • Tell me about a time you had to work with a difficult coworker.
  • Can you give an example of critical feedback you received and how you responded to it?
  • How do you make decisions quickly when you don't have enough information?

“I had an answer ready but rambled way too long on the technical details and forgot to tie it back to impact.”

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LinkedIn·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
LinkedIn system design round for a software engineering role. The whole session was basically one giant distributed systems question that kept branching into sub-topics. Felt like I was defending a thesis by the end of it.
  • Design a distributed job execution system that runs many independent jobs in parallel across a cluster. Walk through the job model, APIs, how you partition work, scheduler and worker design, coordination, fault tolerance, idempotency, result aggregation, scaling, and consistency trade-offs.

“This question is basically five questions stapled together.”

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