LinkedIn used two initial phone screens (one with a recruiter, one with a hiring manager), followed by a day of interviews on site. I met with 7 different people from several different functional areas: research, development, and marketing.

Interviews consisted of a mixture of several things:

• Questions about my background and experience
• Case studies
• Technical questions

Interviewers asked specific questions about LinkedIn's products and asked for ideas on how to design and build these systems.

I have never had as much fun interviewing with a company as I had with LinkedIn. I had a number of very intellectually interesting discussions. I also found that LinkedIn engineers were very friendly and outgoing; I got the sense that the goal of the interviews was as much to see if they wanted to work with you as it was to see if you could contribute technically.

If you are interviewing with LinkedIn, you'll find it helpful to learn something about LinkedIn's products. You should definitely spend some time using different features on the LinkedIn website (suggestions, groups, messages). You should also do some research on the company itself (magazine articles, open source software projects, etc.).

One interviewer described a technical problem that he was trying to solve. He asked how to transform it into a map step and reduce step (or set of steps) to use Hadoop.