An Engineering Manager at LinkedIn plays a pivotal role in shaping the technology, culture, and products that connect the world's professionals. At LinkedIn, engineering leadership is not a purely administrative role; it is a hybrid discipline that requires deep technical intuition, strong execution capabilities, and an empathetic, growth-oriented approach to people management. You are responsible for guiding your team through complex technical landscapes while keeping the "Members First" core value at the center of every decision.

The impact of an Engineering Manager is felt across massive-scale product and infrastructure areas. Whether your team is optimizing the LinkedIn Feed, scaling the Economic Graph, refining Talent Solutions, or building robust backend systems that handle billions of daily queries, you will be solving problems of extreme concurrency and scale. Your success is measured not just by the code your team ships, but by how effectively you grow your engineers, foster a diverse and inclusive environment, and collaborate with cross-functional partners in product, design, and data science.

This role is highly rewarding because it offers the unique opportunity to operate at enterprise scale while maintaining an agile, entrepreneurial team culture. To succeed, you must demonstrate a passion for developing talent, a hands-on understanding of system architecture, and the ability to translate high-level business strategy into concrete technical roadmaps.

The interview questions you will encounter at LinkedIn are designed to evaluate your technical depth, leadership philosophy, and practical management style. While the specific questions may vary depending on the team and location, they consistently target your ability to handle real-world engineering and organizational challenges. Use these representative questions, drawn from real interview experiences, to guide your preparation.

People Management & Team Growth

This category tests your ability to mentor engineers, resolve interpersonal conflicts, manage performance, and build cohesive, high-performing teams.

• How do you manage and turn around a chronically underperforming engineer on your team?
• Describe a time when you had to manage conflict between two senior engineers who disagreed on a critical architectural decision.

Preparing for an Engineering Manager interview at LinkedIn requires a balanced study plan that addresses both technical execution and behavioral leadership. You cannot rely solely on your past management experience; you must also be ready to demonstrate hands-on technical proficiency.

Role-Related Knowledge – This area focuses on your technical domain expertise. You should be prepared to discuss backend system design, distributed systems, API design, and data modeling. For LinkedIn, understanding how to build for high availability, low latency, and horizontal scalability is critical.

People Leadership – LinkedIn values compassionate, constructive leadership. You must be able to articulate a clear philosophy on performance management, career growth, and team culture. Be ready to provide concrete examples of how you have coached engineers and navigated difficult team dynamics.

Project Execution & Scope – Interviewers will evaluate how you manage project lifecycles. You should be highly structured in explaining how you gather requirements, mitigate risks, manage dependencies with external teams, and track delivery metrics.

Culture Alignment – LinkedIn is deeply committed to its culture and values, particularly "Members First," "Relationships Matter," and "Be Open, Honest, and Constructive." Your answers should naturally reflect these principles, showing that you prioritize user experience, value professional relationships, and communicate transparently.

The interview process for an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn is structured, rigorous, and highly comprehensive. It is designed to evaluate your capabilities from multiple angles, ensuring that you possess the technical depth to lead highly skilled ICs and the leadership maturity to manage organizational complexity.

The journey begins with an initial recruiter screen, followed by a dual-track phone screening phase. If you pass the screens, you will move on to the final loop, which includes a unique presentation round. Candidates should expect a process that prioritizes deep, detailed discussions over high-level generalizations.

The timeline above outlines the typical progression from your first contact to the final decision. Candidates should interpret this as a guide to pacing their preparation, ensuring they allocate ample time to practice coding and refine their leadership case studies before the final rounds. While the process is highly standardized, recruiter feedback times can occasionally vary, so staying proactive and maintaining open communication with your recruiter is highly recommended.

To succeed in the LinkedIn Engineering Manager loop, you must understand the specific competencies being evaluated in each core phase. Your interviewers will look for depth, precision, and concrete examples rather than generic management theories.

People Management & Performance Case Study

This is one of the most critical evaluation areas for the Engineering Manager role. LinkedIn often utilizes a structured presentation round or a dedicated case study session to assess how you manage team performance and health.

Be ready to go over:

• Performance Management – Your step-by-step framework for identifying, coaching, and managing underperforming engineers, including the constructive use of Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs).
• Team Scaling & Hiring – How you source, interview, and onboard diverse talent to build balanced, resilient engineering teams.
• Conflict Resolution – Practical approaches to resolving technical disagreements and interpersonal friction within your team or with cross-functional partners.

Example scenarios:

• "Present a detailed plan on how you would handle a senior engineer whose technical output has dropped significantly over the last two quarters."
• "Describe how you would structure a career development plan for a mid-level engineer aiming for a senior promotion."

Technical Execution & Hands-on Coding

Unlike companies where managers step completely away from the codebase, LinkedIn requires its engineering leaders to maintain strong technical skills. You will be evaluated on your ability to write clean, logical code and review the work of others.

Be ready to go over:

• Coding Proficiency – Writing clean, modular, and bug-free code (or detailed pseudo-code) for backend algorithms or system components.
• Code Review Standards – Identifying performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and code smell in a provided code snippet.
• System Components – Understanding fundamental building blocks such as queues, caches, databases, and load balancers.

Advanced concepts (less common):

• Thread safety and concurrency controls in multi-threaded environments.
• Designing low-latency in-memory data structures.

Example scenarios:

• "Write the pseudo-code for a thread-safe, in-memory message queue that supports multiple producers and consumers."
• "Review a backend service implementation and identify potential memory leaks or concurrency issues."