Senior Software Engineer at Linkedin

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Screening round60 min

   The process started with a technical screening round, which was conducted online. During this round, I had to solve a coding problem that involved counting distinct islands in a 2D grid, where diagonally connected cells also counted as part of an island. Alongside this, the interviewer asked me about my past projects, my day-to-day responsibilities, and tested my understanding of operating system basics such as process scheduling, thread lifecycles, mutexes versus semaphores, the difference between stack and heap memory, and some networking fundamentals like TCP and UDP.

   After about a week, I received confirmation to move forward to the onsite rounds.

2. 2

   Technical Coding Round 160 min

   The first onsite round was a coding-focused session. I was given a problem on an N-ary tree where I had to compute the sum of all nodes at the deepest level.

3. 3

   Technical Coding Round 260 min

   This round combined coding with AI-assisted tools. The first problem required implementing a task scheduling algorithm with dependencies, resembling a simplified project build system. The second problem involved determining if a student could complete all courses given a set of course prerequisites, effectively a topological sort problem. This round was slightly chaotic as there was some confusion regarding the AI platform setup, but I managed to complete both tasks and walked the interviewer through my thought process.

4. 4

   System Design Round60 min

   The third onsite round focused entirely on system design. I was asked to design a centralized logging system capable of handling millions of events per second. The discussion revolved around aggregating logs from multiple services, handling out-of-order or delayed logs, and providing real-time querying and dashboard support. I had to explain my high-level architecture, component responsibilities, database choices, caching strategies, and trade-offs while discussing fault tolerance, scalability, and availability. It was very interactive, with the interviewer probing the rationale behind my design decisions.

5. 5

   Managerial round60 min

   The final round was a managerial and behavioral discussion. We started with a deep dive into my past projects, where I explained the challenges I faced, my contributions, and the trade-offs I had to make. The interviewer also asked scenario-based questions, such as how I would handle conflicts with colleagues, and discussed a hypothetical data migration from one data center to another while ensuring minimal downtime. Additionally, we talked about concurrency challenges and strategies to maintain consistency during simultaneous writes. This round felt conversational yet tested my ability to justify design decisions, articulate ownership, and demonstrate leadership skills.

What came up