LinkedIn Interview Preparation

Onsite Interview
Staff Machine Learning Engineering

Why LinkedIn? Build opportunity.

Your dream job could be helping millions find theirs. We’re on a mission to connect every member
of the global workforce with economic opportunity. LinkedIn was built to help professionals achieve
more in their careers, and every day millions of people use our products to make connections, discover
opportunities, and gain insights. Our global reach means we get to make a direct impact on the world’s
workforce in ways no other company can. Here’s your chance to make a huge impact on how the world
works, while transforming your own career.

What is a Machine Learning Engineer?

Our Machine Learning Engineers are working on massive unstructured and semi-structured text and
graph datasets. The ideal candidate will have domain experience (i.e. data mining, information
retrieval, security data science, NLP, advance statistics, machine learning, a strong systems orientation,
etc.) and experience building data mining products. The work you will put forth will directly impact and
fuel LinkedIn’s search relevance, ads targeting, information extraction, and recommendation systems,
user engagement, and fraud detection, etc. Not only do our Machine Learning Engineers create models
and implement them into production, but they are also heavily involved with research & publications on
a regular basis.
Interview Modules:
Host Leader (1 hour)
One of the interviews will be done by a host manager. This person may, or may not, end
up being the final hiring manager, but will be able to provide you with information on the
different projects, engineering team culture, challenges, etc. They will be asking you about
your career history, your job search (why you’re looking, why is LinkedIn interesting, what
technologies are you interested in), and an overview of interesting projects you worked on,
and your involvement in these projects. They will also evaluate your thinking and problem-
solving abilities: how do you figure out problems, develop solutions and alternatives, what is
your decision-making process, your organizational fit, and your motivations.

Data Mining Product Design (1 hour)

The purpose of this module is to assess your ability to translate your data mining knowledge
into viable solutions for solving a real-world data product problem. It will be an open-ended
question to evaluate your creativity with data, analytical skills, and/or machine learning,
as well as your practical problem solving and technical communication. You’ll be expected
to cover the general process of objective/metric definition, data preparation and cleaning,
feature selection, model training, as well as evaluation and A/B testing. It is very important
to understand the details of your proposed approach. Typically, you will be asked how you
would design a particular feature or product (e.g. recommendation system) that currently
exists on LinkedIn’s platform.

Data Mining (1 hour)

This portion of the interview will assess your understanding of practical data mining and
machine learning concepts. You’ll be expected to provide an overview of several machine
learning models (logistic regression, tree or Bayesian models, neural networks, etc.) and
complete a deep dive discussion into at least one model of your choice. For the deep dive,
you can expect to discuss topics such as bias/variance, overfitting, regularization, optimi-
zation, and evaluation metrics. Additionally, there are several add-on questions that can be
used to test your understanding of probability and statistics.
Data Coding (1 hour)
These problems are designed for our AI Engineering track and will rely on topics such as
probability, statistics, and linear algebra. You can also expect an implementation problem
such as k-means. You’ll need to draw upon your implementation and algorithm knowledge
to solve these problems with at least 10 lines of code. Be ready to answer follow up questions
and pick up hints from your interviewer(s).

Staff+ Coding - Data (1 hour)

This round will cover problems that involve extensive whiteboard coding with only moderate
algorithmic and data structure complexity. The focus of this interview should be on the
modularity and extensibility of the code that you write, as well as on finding and fixing bugs
and other errors. Many of these sessions involve pointers, edge cases, abstraction, or all of
the above - and are intended to imitate the kind of day-to-day coding that happens once
the design and implementation strategy for a project has been established. Not only will your
coding skills be evaluated, but our engineers will also look at your ability to create elegant
code (i.e. object-oriented, simple vs. clever), that your code is maintainable (i.e. appropriate
documentation, reusable), that it is held to a high-quality bar (i.e. are you considering testing
and boundary conditions), and that you demonstrate clear communication skills.

Things to keep in mind for coding rounds:

You won’t be given all the information you need to solve the problem. Instead, you’ll need to
ask clarifying questions to identify use cases, edge/corner cases, etc. This is intended to get
a sense of how you approach a problem. It is going to be a very interactive interview, so ask
a lot of questions and only start implementing your solution when you feel you have a good
understanding of the problem. If you start struggling with your solution, explain what you did
and why, so the interviewers are able to give you hints to get you moving along.
During these interviews, the engineers will be looking for:
• Ability to come up with a working solution
• Code completion
• Cleanliness of code
• Time to completion
• Verbalizing your methodologies and approach
• Engaging in conversation with the interviewers
• Generating optimal solutions

Now that you have a better idea about the onsite rounds, please find below some tips/links
that will help you prepare:
• Brush up on abstraction, recursion, HashMaps, edge cases, corner cases.
• Reiterate the questions asked to ensure that what you heard and understood is what the
interviewer meant.
• Spend a short period of time to clarify the requirements before assuming anything.
• Geeks for Geeks
• Topcoder
• Leetcode
• Github
• HackerRank- Coding for interviews
• Software Architecture tutorials
• Design for Scale

Good luck with your interview!