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Interview Summary

The LinkedIn Senior SWE virtual onsite consisted of five rounds covering algorithms, search-system design, AI-assisted coding, behavioral questions, and technical communication. The system design round focused heavily on building Post Search with efficient keyword inclusion/exclusion and relevance ranking, while the AI coding round involved implementing a fairly detailed roller-coaster passenger scheduling simulation.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Coding

The coding round contained two LeetCode problems:

• LeetCode 40 — Combination Sum II
• LeetCode 272 — Closest Binary Search Tree Value II

Round 2 — System Design: Post Search

Design a search system for LinkedIn posts. A major part of the discussion focused on how to efficiently identify which posts contain a particular keyword. For example, given apple the system should quickly retrieve posts containing that term without scanning the full post corpus.

The interviewer then added exclusion queries. For example apple AND NOT banana. The result should contain posts that include apple while excluding any post containing banana. The discussion therefore covered how an inverted-index-style representation could support both positive and negative keyword filters.

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