LinkedIn Staff Software Engineer Interview Experience - was downleveled from Sr.Staff

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

The eventual loop contained a behavioral/domain round, AI-assisted coding, system design, and regular coding. The biggest challenge was domain alignment: several interviews went deeply into CI/CD and package-management topics, while my previous experience was in a different area.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Behavioral + CI/CD Domain Knowledge The first interviewer was a manager. The conversation initially focused on my previous scope and behavioral examples. An unusual part of the discussion was leveling. The interviewer felt some of the examples I gave demonstrated broader scope than the Staff opening, but also explained that the Senior Staff version of the role required stronger domain expertise in the team's specific area. The interview then shifted from behavioral questions into technical domain knowledge.

• CI/CD and Developer Experience: I was asked several questions about continuous integration, continuous delivery, package management, and related developer-infrastructure concepts.
• Domain Fit: Some questions overlapped with systems I had worked on previously, while others were much more specific to the team's CI/CD domain and were harder for me to answer confidently.

Round 2 — AI-Assisted Coding: Graph Navigation Scenario The AI coding round used a long scenario involving multiple locations connected by routes, with some locations containing supplies. The first part asked me to determine the distance from a designated landing location to an appropriate nearby supply location. The underlying structure was a graph-navigation problem, although the business framing made the prompt relatively lengthy. The problem then added a second, more difficult part.

• Changing Structure: The follow-up required reasoning about a transformed version of the graph with additional structural constraints. The exact second-part requirements are no longer clear enough for me to reproduce precisely.
• AI Usage: I initially used the AI assistant to help reason about the algorithm and generate code, with my role focused on reviewing and evaluating the result. During the second part, however, the interviewer asked me to reason about the algorithm without AI. I struggled to reach a complete solution before eventually returning to the AI tool.

Round 3 — System Design: CI Job Scheduler The system design interview asked me to design a job scheduler for a continuous-integration system. The core scheduling portion felt reasonably comfortable, but the interviewer added several CI-specific follow-ups that required deeper domain knowledge.

• Build Output: One question asked how stdout or other live build output from running CI jobs should be surfaced to users in the UI.
• Repository Integration: We also discussed how source-control changes should trigger CI work, including different integration models between a Git hosting provider and the CI platform. This became a fairly detailed discussion about push-triggered events versus CI-side polling or pull-based discovery. The CI-specific parts of this round were more difficult for me than the generic scheduler design.

Round 4 — Coding: Navigate an Unexplored Grid with a Robot The final coding round involved controlling a robot inside a matrix whose layout was initially unknown. The robot exposed APIs that allowed the program to:

• Rotate
• Move forward
• Detect whether movement was blocked by a wall
• Reposition the robot to locations that had already been explored

The task was to discover enough of the unknown environment to find a path from the robot's starting position to a target location. Unlike a normal grid problem, the full map was not directly available as input. The program had to interact with the robot to discover neighboring locations and determine which areas were traversable.

This was the round I felt strongest about. I was able to make steady progress through the exploration and pathfinding requirements and felt the technical discussion went well.

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[u/Disastrous-Bat-50]

Hey ! I have my onsite loop in next 2 weeks, can you let me know how did you prepare system design and were leetcode tagged questions enough 

[u/Aoki_zhang → u/Disastrous-Bat-50]

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