Staff Software Engineer at Linkedin

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Round by round

1. 1

   Screening60 min

   Behavioral:

   • Describe a project where you weren’t the bottleneck. How did you prevent yourself from becoming the critical path?

   • What’s a technical suggestion you made that was adopted by your team? How did you handle pushback?

   • Tell me about a recommendation you gave that changed how your team works. What was the impact? DSA: Custom Frequency Tracker You are given a real-time stream of events. Design a data structure that supports:

   • inc(key) – Increment the count for this key.

   • dec(key) – Decrement the count for this key (if exists).

   • getMin() – Returns the key with the minimum count.

   • getMax() – Returns the key with the maximum count.

   • All operations must work in O(1) average time.

2. 2

   DSA60 min

   Shortest Transformation Sequence in a Network Given two nodes A and B in a directed acyclic graph (DAG), each node represents a service and each edge represents an RPC call. Find the shortest sequence of RPCs that could be called (from A to B) such that no service is called more than once in the sequence. Edge weights represent latencies, optimize for end-to-end latency. Solution: I used Dijkstra’s algorithm with a priority queue, tracking visited nodes to avoid cycles. Follow-ups:

   • What if the graph is huge and doesn’t fit in memory?
   • How would you handle dynamic addition/removal of nodes/edges?
   • Dijkstra's algorithm
3. 3

   System Design60 min

   Design a real-time notification system for LinkedIn feed

4. 4

   Behavioral60 min

   Questions: What are your quality metrics for a production system? How do you approach code reviews at scale? Imagine you are hired to rescue a slow, buggy legacy system. Where do you start? Rank in priority:

   • Bugs in production
   • Lack of automated testing
   • No monitoring
   • Slow response times Describe your mentorship philosophy. How do you balance technical and career mentoring?
5. 5

   Hiring Manager60 min

   Tell me about a time you were recognized for your work. What made it special? Describe a technical disagreement you resolved. How did you find consensus? Share an example of mentoring a junior engineer. What was the outcome? Mini-Design: Design a Job Recommendation System for LinkedIn.

   • How do you gather signals? (Profile, activity, network, explicit feedback.)
   • How do you rank jobs? (Personalization, diversity, recency, employer reputation.)
   • How do you balance relevance and exploration?
   • How do you handle cold starts for new users?
   • How do you prevent recommendation echo chambers?
   • How do you monitor and iterate on the system?

What came up