Low-Level Design rounds at LinkedIn show up from the Senior level onward, and often start as a single-node design that the interviewer then pushes toward a distributed version. Drive requirement clarification yourself before touching a class diagram, and be ready to justify every design pattern choice.
Design an in-memory cache that supports a configurable capacity and a pluggable eviction policy (e.g. LRU or LFU). Be ready to extend the design from a single node into a distributed, multi-node cache.
- Clarify capacity limits, expected read/write patterns, and thread-safety requirements before writing any class.
- Design the eviction policy as a swappable strategy, not hard-coded logic inside the cache class.
- Be ready to discuss what changes when the cache is sharded across multiple nodes, including how hot keys are handled.
More LLD prompts LinkedIn has asked recently
The class design, entity list, design-pattern reasoning and follow-up discussion for these — plus the full worked solution above — are part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
1 more LLD prompts with full class designs in the full Placement-Ready PYQ Kit