The interview experiences of others have always helped me immensely during my periods of job search, and hence its time to give back to this wonderful community.

Background:

• Overall 7+ years of experience
• Working in Amazon (SDE-II)

A senior recruiter from LinkedIn contacted me on LinkedIn. She informed that there will be a phone screen round (elimination round) and then 5 rounds of virtual interviews. This position was for LinkedIn Infrastructure Team.

1. Phone Screen

• Discussion about my current project, some challenges faced and outcome of the project.
• Was asked questions like: Process vs Thread, TCP vs UDP, ACID properties, JVM related basic questions.
• https://leetcode.com/problems/house-robber/ (This was extended to House Robber II in the last 5 mins)

Recruiter reached out to me on the same day. Informed me that they wanted to go ahead with the next rounds.

2. Coding-I

• https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-islands (This was extended to Max Area of Island)
• https://leetcode.com/problems/max-stack/

3. Coding-II

• https://leetcode.com/problems/find-leaves-of-binary-tree/ (This was extended to a directed graph from a binary tree)
• Shortest path between LinkedIn connections. [An adjacency list is given, a source and a target. Find the connection distance between source and target]

4. Concurrency

• Questions like OS paging, Threads vs Process, Mutex
• https://leetcode.com/problems/building-h2o

5. System Design

• Metrics Aggregation System.

6. HM Round

• Discussion on current project and details around it.
• Questions regarding what would be my ideal manager be like.
• Behavioral questions regarding what would I do as a senior engineer (given certain situations and circumstances coming up)

My experience:

• Coding rounds went smoothly. Was able to write complete code for all the problems.
• Got stuck in the concurrency round, although I was quite close to the solution. There was no help/hints from the interviewers. They looked like junior engineers. One of the interviewers said that he would run my code offline to understand it! :P (Mostly he meant that he would paste it on Leetcode and check if it gives an A/C)
• System Design round went ok. I would say that the topic is quite vast to cover within 45 mins as the interviewer keeps probing in between your decisions and explanations which reduces the time.
• Hiring manager was interested in my current project but I got a feeling that he was not inclined towards me as he could not relate to the challenges and the business of my current domain (which is far away from Infrastructure domain)
• Due to my office commitments, had to schedule 4 rounds of technical interviews on the same day (with a 30-min break in between). This was too much to handle, and very stressful.

On a different note, I am a PWS (People who stutter) and interviews for these senior roles are always challenging as explanation and correct articulation of thoughts (System Design and HM Round) is of utmost importance and decide the final outcome.

All the best to my fellow Leetcoders!!!