LinkedIn

Updated July 12, 2026 · techinterview.org

Interview Process Overview

LinkedIn’s interview process emphasizes technical excellence, relationship building, and data-driven decision making. As part of Microsoft, LinkedIn maintains its distinct culture focused on connecting professionals and creating economic opportunity.

What to Expect

Recruiter Screen: Discussion of your professional background, interest in LinkedIn’s mission, and role requirements.

Technical Phone Screen (1 round): 1-hour coding interview focusing on algorithms and data structures. Medium difficulty problems using a shared coding environment.

Onsite Interviews (4-5 rounds):

• Coding Rounds (2-3): Algorithm problems covering arrays, strings, trees, graphs, and dynamic programming. LinkedIn values efficient solutions with good time/space complexity.
• System Design (1 round): Design scalable systems like social networks, news feeds, messaging platforms, or recommendation systems. Consider data modeling and graph structures.
• Behavioral (1 round): Questions about collaboration, driving results, and building relationships. LinkedIn values “relationships matter” as a core principle.

Common Question Topics

• Graphs: Social network analysis, connection recommendations, shortest path between professionals. Expect BFS for degree-of-connection features (finding 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections) and shortest path between two members; a common prompt is counting mutual connections between two profiles. Grouping members into connected components also comes up, so write your traversals iteratively to avoid a stack overflow on deep graphs.
• Trees: Binary trees, tree traversals, organizational hierarchies. Practice level-order (BFS) plus both recursive and iterative DFS, and be ready for lowest common ancestor and serialize/deserialize. Org-chart questions map to n-ary trees, so handle nodes with any number of children rather than assuming left/right.
• Hash Tables: Deduplication, frequency analysis, caching. Many medium problems collapse to a single pass with a hash map — counting frequencies, grouping by key, or checking membership in O(1). Be ready to build an LRU cache from scratch with a hash map plus a doubly linked list, a recurring LinkedIn favorite.
• Sorting/Searching: Custom sorting, binary search variations. Know how to sort with a custom comparator (for example, ordering members by several tie-broken fields) and how to run binary search on the answer, not just on a sorted array. Interviewers probe whether you notice the monotonic structure that makes binary search apply.
• System Design: Social networks, recommendation engines, news feed algorithms, messaging systems, search indexing. For the feed, weigh fan-out on write against fan-out on read and how you would handle high-connection members. Cover data modeling for the connection graph, caching hot profiles, and how ranking signals drive recommendations — the goal is showing you reason about scale and read/write trade-offs.

Preparation Tips

1. Study Graph Algorithms: LinkedIn’s core is a social graph. Master BFS, DFS, shortest path, and graph traversal problems.
2. Practice Medium Problems: Focus on 100-150 LeetCode problems at medium difficulty. LinkedIn rarely asks extremely hard questions.
3. Understand LinkedIn’s Products: Use LinkedIn actively. Understand feed algorithms, connection suggestions, job recommendations, and messaging.
4. Show Data-Driven Thinking: LinkedIn emphasizes metrics and A/B testing. Discuss how you’ve used data to make decisions.
5. Prepare Collaboration Stories: Demonstrate strong relationship-building and cross-team collaboration.

Interview Culture

LinkedIn values transformation, integrity, collaboration, humor, and results. The company culture emphasizes building relationships, data-driven decisions, and creating economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Show genuine interest in connecting professionals and career development.

Last Updated: February 2026