I just completed the interview loop for this position. It went as expected after reading related posts here, but I wanted to share in case others find it useful.

The tech screen determined if I'd proceed to the full virtual on-site round. This involved two questions worked through on Coderpad. The questions were "Valid Triangle" and "3Sum" from LeetCode. The interviewer didn't say anything after presenting each question until I solved it; he would just nod as I asked questions and tried to engage him. I did well solving the problems but was surprised I passed this round because of how awkward it felt.

On-site:

Hiring Manager: Usual questions about my experience and resume. I got the sense this person was overwhelmed or underqualified because he didn't project any confidence that he knew how to identify good engineers.

System Design: Whiteboard session building the LinkedIn feed. This went well, but the interviewer was pompous and struggled with English.

Craftsmanship: Met with two engineers and discussed how I work as an engineer. This was really fun. Think of it as talking shop with a couple of engineers. This was my favorite session, and these engineers were awesome.

Another Coderpad session: Of all the awkward sessions at LinkedIn, this was the worst. There was an EM and a junior engineer. The problem was to build a parser to parse a JSON string into JSON model objects. These two had no clue how to interview, and I could tell they were reading from a script the entire time and were really nervous. I ended up coming up with a good solution, but neither of them understood it because it wasn’t on their script.

Final Session: Building a simple app in Xcode. This was really easy but a bit of a race against time. I completed this without issue, and these two interviewers were competent.

The recruiter called two days later and said they would make an offer if I would accept being down-leveled. I passed. After I saw the quality of engineers and EMs, it became obvious I wasn’t interested. I saw this pattern of down-leveling as I researched LinkedIn.

3Sum and Valid Triangle LeetCode