Hi everyone! This month I gave onsite interview for Linkedin's Software Engineer role [Systems and Infrastructure Engineer], just wanted to share my interview experience.
Applied through a referral in May 3rd week. Received a call from recruiter during last week of May. They described the process, the role and scheduled the call for telephonic screening.
1. Telephonic Round: Two interviewers were there. After basic introduction, they asked me to describe one of my projects, then asked one or two questions related to the project (distributed queue). Some questions on OS and Networks also was asked. After 30 mins in the interview they shared a coding question, it was based on Graphs (like number of connected land/water cells in 0-1 matrix but the language was different)(easy-medium difficulty). Solved it and talked about Time complexity.
Onsites:
1. Concurrency Round: 1 interviewer was there. Was asked to design a delayed scheduler. Few along the way questions on Locks, Concurrency, threadPool etc
Note: Linked asks this question a lot, so be prepared. I've mostly seen this question asked 6/10 times for concurrency round, then 3/10 times Bounded blocking queue and 1/10 concurrent hashmap or any other question.
2. Coding and Algo 1: 1 Interviewer, 2 medium questions:
a. Design data structure which supports operations insert, delete and delete random in O(1) time. Was asked questions like how to handle duplicates.
b. 2-d Matrix representing n people following each other, find the influencer (the person who's followed by everyone and does'nt follow anyone else)
3. DSA Round: 1 interviewer, 1 question was asked, given an api to one of our application which supports storing key value pairs in DB(kinda like no-sql db) but it had a limitation that key size is very small (6-digit). So build a solution which supports adding any sized key.
TBH I didn't think this round went good at all, I discussed approaches like using a hashing function to limit the large key sizes to 6 and then storing, another idea about storing the key values in a temporary map. Overall didn't really understood whether this was an algorithmic problem or design problem
4. Coding and Algo 2: 2 interviews joined. 2 questions were asked
a. DP problem related to cake colouring where you can't same the adjacent cakes with same color. Coded a recursive dp solution. Further they asked what if the input array was circular
b. Given 2 sorted arrays, find first k smallest products
Proposed a solution using priority queue then they asked to improve but couldn't optimize it. I was thinking 2 pointers but didn't make it to a solution
5. Host Manager Round: HM introduced themselves, the team and the infra verticals. Asked me questions about my company, my team, what's the impact of my role, why leaving my current org, why Linkedin?. Then asked one project to describe and its impact. Finally, asked a problem of design and we discussed couple of approaches for 4-5 minutes. Last few minutes I asked him questions, overall It was a fun conversation.
All rounds were of 1 hour each. All interviewers were polite and nice.
Received a rejection mail today :/ Didn't felt like writing this at all, but hoping it be helpful to someone.
Thanks for reading.
Note: For concurrency round I'm also a newbie, I tried to solve all concurrency tagged questions. Questions here are very less and are mostly easy ones so I tried to understand different approaches and build concepts. Other resources mostly that I followed were baeldung, GFG articles & videos of Defog tech's videos which I found very informative.
Links:
Defog Tech Youtube
Concurrency Leetcode
