Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at LinkedIn with 3.1 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 54.2% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 23 days to get hired, when considering 316 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at LinkedIn overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at LinkedIn as a Software Engineer according to 316 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 48%
One on one interview: 19%
Skills test: 12%
Group panel interview: 8%
Presentation: 6%
Background check: 3%
Personality test: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
Other: 1%
Drug test: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Dec 2025
Interview
The process began with a first screening, which included a recruiter call and a coding screen. This was followed by an onsite interview loop consisting of five rounds: a standard coding round, a 'coding with AI' round, a hiring manager round, a system design (high-level design) round, and a technical interview focused on a project deep dive. Verdict: I did not get hired.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding: A LeetCode-style problem where you need to "flip K most ones" to get the maximum island (likely Max Consecutive Ones III), with a follow-up question asking how to handle it if the island is in a circular array.
System Design: Design a system to discard DDoS packets.
The interview process started with a screening round featuring one LeetCode medium problem and an SQL challenge. This was followed by a comprehensive onsite with five rounds: a LeetCode coding challenge, an SQL assessment, a system design interview, a hiring manager conversation to evaluate cultural fit, and finally a team matching phase to find the right team.
Interviewed for an SDE role. The process was well-organized and the recruiters were responsive throughout. That said, the technical rounds were significantly more challenging than expected — definitely come prepared to go deep. Overall a valuable experience regardless of the outcome.
That was a real stroke of luck — when I got to the coding round and encountered a question on finding the maximum subarray sum, I had literally seen this exact problem on prachub.com a few days earlier. The interview kicked off with a recruiter screen, followed by a technical phone interview. It was intense, especially with the focus on algorithms and data structures. I also faced some behavioral questions that challenged my experience. After a final onsite round, I received an offer and happily accepted. Overall, it was tough but rewarding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an integer array nums, find the contiguous subarray (containing at least one number) which has the largest sum and return its sum. Walk through Kadane's algorithm and explain the O(n) approach.