Professional networking platform with rich data and ML-driven recommendations.
4 Rounds
~21 Days
Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Data Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you took an intelligent risk in a data engineering project. What was the outcome?
#Intelligent Risks
#Decision Making
Data Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you had to push back on a product manager or stakeholder's data request. How did you handle it?
#Communication
#Open and Honest
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to learn a new big data technology on the fly to meet a critical deadline.
#Adaptability
#Demand Excellence
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Give an example of how you acted like an owner when a critical data pipeline broke over the weekend or outside of normal hours.
#Ownership
#Incident Management
Data Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you improved a data process or pipeline that directly benefited the end-user experience.
#Members First
#Impact
Data Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior engineer on the architecture of a data pipeline. How did you resolve it?
#Conflict Resolution
#Relationships Matter
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a list of nested integers, return the sum of all integers in the list weighted by their depth. For example, given the list {{1,1},2,{1,1}}, return 10.
#Depth-First Search
#Recursion
#Arrays
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
easy
Given an array of strings representing words and two distinct words, find the shortest distance between these two words in the list.
#Arrays
#Two Pointers
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a function to find all LinkedIn connections of a specific user up to the Nth degree. You are given an API getConnections(userId) that returns a list of direct connections.
#Graphs
#Breadth-First Search
#Queues
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an array of intervals representing active user sessions on LinkedIn, merge all overlapping intervals to find the total continuous active time.
#Sorting
#Arrays
#Intervals
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a non-empty list of job search keywords and an integer K, return the K most frequent keywords. Sort the result by frequency from highest to lowest, and alphabetically for ties.
#Hash Table
#Heap
#Sorting
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the top 3 job postings with the highest application rate (applications / views) in the last 7 days. Only include jobs with at least 100 views.
#Aggregations
#Filtering
#Sorting
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
Write a SQL query to calculate the 7-day rolling average of profile views for each user.
#Window Functions
#Time Series
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a 'connections' table and a 'messages' table, write a SQL query to find the percentage of users who connected with each other but never sent a message.
#Joins
#Subqueries
#Math
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find members who applied to jobs at companies where they have at least one 1st-degree connection.
#Complex Joins
#Filtering
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
hard
You have a table of user activity logs. Write a SQL query to sessionize the data, where a new session starts if there is a gap of more than 30 minutes between activities.
#Window Functions
#Sessionization
#CTEs
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a Python script to parse a large JSONL file containing LinkedIn post metadata, filter out posts with less than 10 likes, and output the result to a new file. Ensure it handles files larger than available RAM.
#Python
#File I/O
#Memory Management
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given a binary tree representing a company's organizational chart, write a function to find the lowest common manager (Lowest Common Ancestor) of two given employees.
#Trees
#Recursion
#Depth-First Search
Data Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to find the cumulative sum of premium subscriptions purchased per month for the year 2023.
#Window Functions
#Aggregations
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Implement an LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache. This is often used in data engineering to cache frequent database lookups.
#Data Structures
#Hash Table
#Linked List
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Write a SQL query to identify the second highest salary within each engineering department at LinkedIn.
#Window Functions
#Ranking
Data Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Given an array of integers `nums` sorted in ascending order (with distinct values), and a target integer `target`, write a function to search `target` in `nums`. If `target` exists, then return its index. Otherwise, return -1. The array might be rotated at an unknown pivot.
#Binary Search
#Arrays
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a data pipeline to power the 'Who viewed your profile' feature. How do you handle the massive scale of profile views and ensure near real-time updates?
#Stream Processing
#Kafka
#Data Modeling
#Scalability
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time dashboard for LinkedIn Job Postings analytics that allows recruiters to see how many impressions, clicks, and applies their job posts received in the last 24 hours.
#OLAP
#Real-time Analytics
#Kafka
#Apache Pinot
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
How would you design a scalable ETL pipeline to sync relational data from MySQL (e.g., user profile updates) to a data lake (Hadoop/Iceberg) for offline analytics?
#Change Data Capture
#ETL
#Data Lake
#Apache Iceberg
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to detect spam connection requests on LinkedIn in near real-time.
#Machine Learning Pipelines
#Stream Processing
#Feature Engineering
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a data warehouse schema for LinkedIn Learning. We need to track user video consumption, course completions, and instructor payouts.
#Dimensional Modeling
#Star Schema
#Data Warehousing
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to process and store LinkedIn Feed impressions to ensure we do not show the same post to a user more than twice in a 24-hour period.
#Caching
#Bloom Filters
#Stream Processing
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How do you handle data skewness in a Spark join operation where one specific company ID has millions of records while others have very few?
#Apache Spark
#Performance Tuning
#Data Skew
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
Explain how Kafka handles consumer offsets. What happens if a consumer fails before committing the offset?
#Apache Kafka
#Fault Tolerance
#Distributed Systems
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Describe the difference between a Star Schema and a Snowflake Schema. Which would you use for LinkedIn's ad campaign reporting and why?
#Data Warehousing
#Schema Design
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How does Apache Spark achieve fault tolerance? Explain the concept of RDD lineage.
#Apache Spark
#Architecture
#Fault Tolerance
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
You have an Airflow DAG that processes 10TB of daily log data, but it's taking too long and missing SLAs. How would you go about debugging and optimizing it?
#Apache Airflow
#Performance Tuning
#Troubleshooting
Data Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the concept of 'Shuffle' in Apache Spark. Why is it an expensive operation and how can you minimize it?
#Apache Spark
#Performance Tuning
#Distributed Computing
Data Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
What is Apache Iceberg and how does it solve the limitations of the traditional Hive metastore in a data lake?
#Data Lake
#Apache Iceberg
#Table Formats
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.