I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at LinkedIn (Sunnyvale, CA) in Nov 2015
Interview
Referred by a friend and got contacted by a recruiter in Data & Infrastructure field. I am not quite sure whether this position is the best fit for me but I took the phone screen one week later. I answered two quick questions (semaphore vs mutex, write-back vs write-through) and two coding questions. Even though I aced all of them, I felt like I am not in a strong position in infrastructure track. One week later recruiter invited me for onsite interview and kindly agreed to switch me to application track. The onsite was amazing and had lots of fun. Recruiters seemed to let you impressed with great food and working environment there. Four rounds in total, two algorithm, one system design and one manager. I found lots of details were asked in algorithm rounds: you are supposed to prove assumptions mathematically and make sure you got everything correct at each step. It was not like coding up the answers correctly was the final expectation, but rather the way you tackle them. For system design question, make sure you did some research on internet to find how to prepare that (Quora, HireTech). If you are familiar with web server, load balance, master-slave db, data sharding, caching, denormalizing, etc.. you are in good shape. Got offer two weeks later. It is a late offer because recruiter was not so quick to reply emails and didn't respect my deadlines. I have signed on Google and need to reject it. But overall, great company and great interview process.
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.
Overall, a good interview process and the team were very friendly during the interview process and it was very good and pleasant. Nothing in regard to negative feedback or anything as such like that.