I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Mountain View, CA) in Sep 2014
Interview
Interview Process was very smooth - Took about 5 weeks. Had two initial phone interviews. These rounds were purely programming rounds. Got notified of the results the same day itself. Onsite interview consisted of 6 rounds. 2-programs, 1- design, 1- lunch, 1-manager. Interview process was very smooth and organized and all the interviewers made sure that I felt comfortable with the process. I would suggest practicing lot of programming questions, look into LinkedIn opensource projects, read a lot about Distributed Systems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Read in depth about the technologies that you have used so far, even though you haven't used it recently.
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.