Current Company: Product based company
YOE: ~5.5
LeetCode questions solved ~ 900

Interview at: LinkedIn
Role: SSE
Process took 1 month overall.
Tentative date of Interviews : Nov 2024
Offer - Dec 2024
A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn

Before sharing the entire process, I just wanna share a couple things. I faced constant rejections from March this year. Some notable ones are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Meta, Stripe, Atlassian. I had zero hopes of getting an offer from LinkedIn especially I put too much efforts but didn't get the desired result. At certain times in a few companies, I felt I would receive the offer but didn't. I realised I wasn't handling rejections in the right way and almost took a month break from interviews and went for a small vacation. That vacation was important and I came with a fresh mind. I almost had given up and didn't take anything too seriously and continued to just put efforts without worrying about the outcome but luck played a role in getting me an offer and making sure I was rewarded before the year end. I went to the LinkedIn interviews with a relaxed mindset without expecting much in return.

Some of my previous experiences

1. https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5173205/microsoft-azure-networking-awaiting-feedback/2429947
2. https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/5076847/amazon-sde-2-bangalore-another-failed-attempt/2370189

Now here is my interview process

Round 1 - Technical Phone Screen

Maximum Subarray Sum – Kadane’s Algorithm - No modifications, exactly the same question
A tree based DS question which I don't recall now.
Verdict - Strong hire

[Onsites]

Round1 - DSA

1. Similar to this - https://leetcode.com/problems/k-closest-points-to-origin/description/
2. A hard question on an array which I don't recall now.
   I couldn't solve the 2nd question, just discussed the approach.

Round2 - DSA
I struggled the most in this round, faced two hard questions. The interviewer was nice and extended the time by 15 minutes as well.

1. Ditto - https://leetcode.com/problems/sliding-window-maximum/description/ - Was somehow able to implement it.
2. Top k elements after multiplying array1 values with array 2 - This question was challenging, please guys let me know your approach here. I could only discuss my approach and the time ran out.
   Example - arr1 = [1, 2, 5, 9] , arr2 = [1, 3, 4, 6]
   The brute force solution is trivial, multiply both the arrays and return top k elements but this is not what the interviewer was expecting. I could somehow navigate through this round.

Round 3 - Host Leader
A typical hiring manager round. This round went well.

Round 4- Technical Communication
In this round, I was asked to explain the most challenging project that I had worked with. This round went pretty welll too.

Round 5 - System Design
Design Top K system where I was asked to build a system that would gather exceptions from different services and show the top K exceptions over a 24 hour time window. I gave different approaches, discussed about data pipelines. This round went pretty good too.

Verdict - Selected
Will Update the compensation details soon.

I hope this experience helps people. If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this journey, it’s that persistence is underrated. To all those people who are facing constant rejections, please remember you would be rewarded at the right time but please just keep putting efforts. Also, luck is equally important. For some people this might not be a big deal but for me it wasn't easy and definitely worth the hard work.