The phone screen was more intense than I'd anticipated, lasting about 45 minutes with a mix of behavioral and technical questions. They probed my understanding of system design, specifically challenging me to think through a notification delivery service. I felt prepared, thanks to the company-specific questions I found on PracHub that outlined similar scenarios. The final rounds focused heavily on the scalability and reliability of systems. After a series of interviews, I received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, it was a rigorous but rewarding experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design LinkedIn's notification fan-out service that delivers post-engagement notifications (e.g. someone reacted to your post or commented on your article) to millions of subscribers in near real-time, including how you would handle 'hotspot' creators with millions of followers, deduplicate redundant notifications when many actions target the same content, and guarantee at-least-once delivery across regional failures.
I applied online. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Bengaluru) in Sept 2024
Interview
The interview process consisted of five rounds. The first round was a System Design interview where I was asked to design a TypeAhead (autocomplete) system. The discussion focused on scalability, data structures, ranking of suggestions, and handling large-scale traffic.
There were two DSA rounds covering standard LeetCode-style problems. The questions were based on Linked Lists, Breadth-First Search (BFS), and the Celebrity Problem. The interviewers mainly evaluated problem-solving skills, approach, optimization, and code quality.
The next round focused on past experience, where I walked through my resume, discussed some of the projects I had worked on, and explained the most challenging technical problems I had encountered and how I solved them.
The final round was with the Hiring Manager. It was a conversational discussion covering my background, career aspirations, team fit, and motivation for exploring the opportunity. Overall, the process was straightforward and focused on both technical competence and prior experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
System Design: TypeAhead system design
DSA (2 rounds): Normal leet code questions on linkedin list, BFS, Celebrity problem
Past experience round: Just explain resume and interesting projects and what I found challenging
Hiring manager round: Normal HR manager round
I applied online. I interviewed at LinkedIn (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2026
Interview
Had an initial phone screen round-
Questions - Regular Medium level question, string manipulation
Follow up - Concurrency related on top of the first question.
Waiting for the second round right now