I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Jul 2016
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter and went through phone and on-site. The overall interview process onsite was very lousy. There was so much confusion since the beginning regarding the exact timing of the interviews. The main interviewer didn't show up on time (30 minutes late) so the shadowing guy started a question, and then when the main interviewer showed up, he didn't even show any interest in the interview and was acting like a jerk.
After the coding interview there were a couple of system design interviews and in the end a behavioral interview. 5 rounds in total including the lunch.
After the interviews, the recruiter passed me at the door and didn't have to courtesy to say goodbye and didn't ever contact me about my interview result.
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.