LinkedIn Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — Five-Round Onsite, Timezone Curveball in System Design

LinkedIn onsite interview experience, giving back to the community here.

Some background first: I'm an SDE3 with 5 years of experience. I'd been grinding coding problems for a while, but my system design prep was just so-so.

The whole onsite was five rounds, one hour each:

Round 1 was a project deep dive. I talked through two projects, and the interviewer kept the conversation pretty natural, digging into details as we went — it felt like syncing with someone on the team. Not too hard, mainly just needed to explain the tradeoffs clearly.

Round 2 was coding: LFU, a hard problem. Lucky for me it was one I'd already done before from interview experience posts. The interviewer didn't interrupt while I was writing, and it went smoothly.

Round 3 was system design: design a calendar system. I'd practiced this one before, and when prepping I mainly focused on event scheduling and recurring events — I didn't expect the interviewer to ask about timezones, and I got stuck for a bit there. I talked through the UTC storage approach, and the interviewer didn't push much further on it, so I think it was probably fine.

Round 4 was coding, two problems — "Airflow" and a variant of "Sanqisan" — time was a bit tight but I finished both.

Round 5 was tech experience / behavioral. A different interviewer, and we kept talking about projects — they asked about some technical decisions. The vibe was decent.

Overall the interview experience was decent, and the interviewers were all pretty nice. I just wasn't well prepared for the SD round — that's a lesson learned. But I heard they might be doing a hiring freeze, so I don't know if I'll actually hear back.