LINKEDIN · SYSTEM DESIGN
LinkedIn system design interview questions
Mid-level and senior candidates get one HLD round, usually product or feed style. Staff candidates get design-flavored coding plus deeper architecture discussion, and the technical communication round tests how much scope they owned.
Which levels get a design round
| Level | LinkedIn title | Design round | Low-level design |
|---|---|---|---|
| SDE 1 | Software Engineer (entry) | Usually not | – |
| SDE 2 | Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer | Yes | – |
| Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) | Senior Software Engineer | Yes | – |
| Staff Software Engineer | Staff, Senior Staff, Principal Staff | Yes | – |
Design questions candidates report
-
Typeahead / autocomplete
Design the typeahead box that suggests the top five queries as you type. Requirements and scale (over a hundred thousand requests a second at peak), the suggest API, a trie with top-K cached at every node, an offline pipeline that rebuilds it from query logs, a small real-time layer for trending terms, replication versus sharding, client-side tricks and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Search autocomplete -
Home feed
How to design a ranked social news feed for a billion daily users: scope, traffic and memory math for per-user inboxes, the feed API and data model, fan-out of friend posts through an event stream, candidate generation and multi-stage ranking, privacy filtering at read time, seen-state and new-post signals, and the trade-offs you should name.
Full walkthrough: News Feed Practise on the design board -
Notification system
How to design a shared notification service that any team can call: one API for push, SMS, email and in-app, user preferences and quiet hours, templates, separate priority queues so a marketing blast never delays a login code, per-provider rate limits, retries with backoff, deduplication, dead device tokens, bulk campaign fan-out and delivery tracking.
Full walkthrough: Notification system -
Search system
Design a web search engine that answers hundreds of thousands of queries a second over tens of billions of pages. Requirements and scale, the search API and index data model, building a document-partitioned inverted index, a fresh tier for news, scatter-gather query serving with tail-latency tricks, multi-stage ranking with link-based signals, caching, failure handling and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Google Search
Also reported
- Feature-flag / experiment ramp service
- Recommendation system with sparse data
How to answer any design question: the LADDER method · How the design round is scored by level
Questions people ask
When does LinkedIn ask system design?
A design round is part of the loop for SDE 2 (Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer), Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) (Senior Software Engineer), Staff Software Engineer (Staff, Senior Staff, Principal Staff). Mid-level and senior candidates get one HLD round, usually product or feed style. Staff candidates get design-flavored coding plus deeper architecture discussion, and the technical communication round tests how much scope they owned.
What system design questions does LinkedIn ask?
Candidates report: Typeahead / autocomplete; Home feed; Notification system; Search system; Feature-flag / experiment ramp service; Recommendation system with sparse data.
System design questions at other companies
- Amazon
- Microsoft
- Meta
- Apple
- Netflix
- Uber
- Airbnb
- Stripe
- Atlassian
- Goldman Sachs
- Salesforce
- Oracle
- Adobe
- Flipkart
- Walmart Global Tech
- PhonePe
- Swiggy
- Razorpay
System design questions across all companies · Behavioral questions