LinkedIn·Software Engineer

LinkedIn Software Engineer interview experience

Posted Sep 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My first step for a Software Engineer role at LinkedIn was a phone screening that felt deliberately structured.

The interviewer said there would be two questions: a quick “smoke test” first, mainly to help me get comfortable with the format, and they wouldn’t judge me on that one. The second question was the real challenge.

For the actual coding part, I was asked to find the second minimum node in a binary tree. The smoke test and the primary question were both short enough to fit in a single phone screen, but the second problem was the one that really mattered for how the round went. By the end, I had a clearer sense of what they expected from me on that call, even though I didn’t feel like the first

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