Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025) LinkedIn engineering loops — round by round, including what was asked, how the candidate approached it, and the outcome.
One complete journey, start to finish
Round 1 — Screening
A career/behavioral discussion covering conflict handling and project transitions, plus a hard Max Stack (peekMax/popMax) design problem.
Round 2 — DSA (Apps track)
A tricky sliding-window minimum-window-substring problem, extended into a circular-string version.
Round 3 — DSA & Algorithms
A word-ladder optimization problem pushed toward O(M×N) time, plus a two-pointer string-distance follow-up.
Round 4 — System Design
Design a flexible in-memory cache, then defend how it behaves once sharded across multiple nodes, including hot-key handling.
Round 5 — Craftsmanship / Behavioral
8-10 scenario questions on code quality, mentorship, and improving legacy systems.
Round 6 — Hiring Manager
A deep dive into a past leadership project, plus a short, fast-paced notification-system high-level design discussion.
Key takeaway: At the Staff level, behavioral and leadership rounds carried as much weight as the coding rounds — have concrete stories ready, not just algorithms, and expect system design to extend past a single-node design into distributed tradeoffs.
More real interview journeys
The first round of each journey below is shown in full; the rest of each candidate's journey — every remaining round, verbatim — is part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
Phone Screen
A seat-allocation problem similar to 'can-place-flowers', plus a single-pass nested-list weighted-sum variant.
🔒 5 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit