LinkedIn Frontend (UI) Software Engineer Interview Guide

LinkedIn is the biggest professional network in the world. The company supports a billion members in more than 200 countries. Chances are, you’ve used LinkedIn to build a professional profile or begin a job search. If you’re interested in joining a company committed to helping professionals make powerful connections and build valuable skills, LinkedIn could be a great fit for you.

LinkedIn’s mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. In addition to the core social network and app, LinkedIn products include:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: A platform to facilitate relationship-based selling.
• LinkedIn Recruiter: A comprehensive platform for hiring.
• LinkedIn Jobs: A powerful job board serving candidates best-fit openings based on skills, experience, and goals.
• LinkedIn Learning: A skill-building platform offering thousands of courses.

Because LinkedIn’s key products are web-based, it relies on a large team of software engineers (SWEs) to carry out its mission. Engineers work in one of 12 specialties:

• AI & machine learning
• Information security (InfoSec)
• Backend (apps)
• Mobile
• Data science
• Site reliability (SRE)
• Developer (productivity) tools
• Systems & infrastructure (SI)
• Engineering leadership
• Technical program management (TPM)
• Frontend (UI)
• Trust & Safety (TnS)

Our guide below covers how to prepare for LinkedIn’s frontend (UI) software engineer interview.

What does a LinkedIn frontend SWE do?

LinkedIn strives to ensure its many products are delightful, performant, safe, and familiar for users. Frontend and UI engineers are key to creating this experience.

As a frontend and UI engineer, you’ll typically be assigned to one or more core products. Given the size of LinkedIn’s engineering team and wide scope of projects, your interview will reflect the unique needs of the job.

Generally, in this role, you own frontend development and collaborate closely with visual/interaction designers, product managers, and other engineers to launch new offerings, iterate on existing features, and provide a world-class user experience.

An open job description for a senior frontend engineer at LinkedIn includes items like:

= Implement cutting-edge technologies. Write state-of-the-art code to keep LinkedIn at the cutting edge of current technology. Ensure the site is delightful, secure, performant, and accessible to all members. Meet regularly with cross-functional colleagues.

Just like at other big tech companies, the scope of responsibilities and project complexity scales with seniority. At LinkedIn, engineering roles fall into one of three categories:

• SWE: Entry-level engineers with a few years of experience.
• Senior SWE: Engineers with 5-7 years of experience; typically given greater ownership over larger projects.
• Staff SWE: Responsibilities include participating in technical strategy discussions and leading cross-functional projects.

Compensation scales accordingly. According to Levels.FYI:

• SWE: $213K with $154K base and a $12K bonus.
• Senior SWE: $313K with $192K base and $15K bonus.
• Staff SWE: $434K with $226K base and $30K bonus.

What are the typical job requirements for a LinkedIn SWE?

“We're looking for developers to help build rich, dynamic client-side web/mobile applications, leveraging new technologies like React, TypeScript, Jetpack Compose with Kotlin, AutoLayout with Swift, GraphQL, to launch beautiful, usable and scalable products to close to 1 billion global users.” -LinkedIn job posting for a frontend engineer

Excluding interns, candidates will typically need:

• Education: Bachelor’s degree or equivalent in computer science, engineering, or a similar field.
• Specialized Experience: At least 2 years minimum of programming experience with modern frameworks like Angular and React, and debugging tools.

Preferred qualifications include:

• An MS or PhD in computer science or a related discipline
• Expert-level knowledge of Ember
• Experience building public APIs with Java
• Experience building consumer products

To differentiate yourself, be sure to show that you can build user-facing products and frontend applications. Also, demonstrate that you can adopt new technologies given a changing domain. LinkedIn loves to hire lifelong learners.

Recommendations before you apply for LinkedIn SWE roles

• Get to know LinkedIn’s suite of products. Going into the interview with a perspective on LinkedIn’s approach to design will be beneficial. Check out the product page for an overview, and then head over to the design team’s project page to get a flavor.
• Revamp your LinkedIn profile and resume. LinkedIn’s company culture prizes the ability to communicate clearly and effectively, and your LinkedIn profile and resume are the perfect way to demonstrate this from the beginning. Make sure you can tell a coherent, compelling story around all the experiences listed on your resume and why you’re an ideal candidate.
• Practice with mock interviews. Exponent's coaching services are your best friend. Don’t limit your pool of mock partners to other SWEs and peers in tech. Grab a non-tech friend and describe the most recent project you spearheaded. Communicating effectively with engineers and non-technical collaborators will be critical to your success.
• Lean on your community. Connect with a few LinkedIn SWEs and ask about their interview experiences. Since they’ve gone through what you’re going through now, they’re great sources of information and support.

Interview Process

There are generally three stages to LinkedIn’s frontend and UI design interviews:

• A short recruiter screen, where you’ll get asked standard behavioral questions.
• A technical screen, where you’ll answer a few questions on CS fundamentals and one or two coding questions.
• An onsite interview consisting of at least four rounds, including coding, system design, frontend design, and behavioral interviews.

From recruiter screen to offer, the process can take 4-8 weeks.

Recruiter Screen

The first interview, a 30-minute recruiter phone screen, is fairly straightforward and primarily based on your resume. Expect questions about your past work experience, major projects listed on your resume, and why you want to work at LinkedIn.

Common questions include:

LinkedIn looks for candidates who demonstrate professionalism and a collaborative mindset, and can contribute positively to its culture. To ace this interview, prepare an “elevator pitch” that positions you as an ideal candidate. Our biggest tip for the recruiter screen is to practice talking through your resume succinctly, clearly, and in a way that fits LinkedIn’s story and guiding principles.

Your recruiter will also share details about the rest of the interview process, so be prepared with any questions.

Technical Screen

Next, you’ll meet with a software engineer who will ask you a few basic knowledge questions. You’ll then solve one or two coding problems. This conversation typically runs for one hour.

The short answer questions will be specific to your frontend background. For example, mobile candidates will be asked iOS/Android-specific questions and web candidates will be asked CCS/HTML-related questions. The purpose is to ease you into the technical questions and test your communication skills.

Common questions include:

• Explain CSS specificity.
• What’s the difference between an arrow function and a traditional JavaScript function?

The coding problems will assess your knowledge of basic data structures and algorithms as well as CS fundamentals. To prep, choose your strongest language and practice solving problems using CoderPad with a timer. Aim to solve easy to medium problems in about 15-20 minutes.

Your code doesn’t have to run to be perfect. Focus on completing the task efficiently, and be prepared to optimize if prompted by your interviewer. Always articulate your thought process, and don’t forget to talk through test strategies and edge cases.

To prepare, browse easy-medium data structures and algorithms questions.

Onsite Interview Loop

The onsite LinkedIn frontend and UI design interview consists of four conversations covering:

• Coding questions
• A system design round
• A frontend design round
• Behavioral questions

Coding

The coding round during the onsite is similar to the initial technical screen but may be slightly more challenging. You’ll have an hour to solve one or two problems. Traditionally, LinkedIn prefers candidates to write their code on a whiteboard, but if your interview is remote, you may use Coderpad or something similar.

What are LinkedIn coding interviewers looking for?

Your interviewers are assessing you in four main focus areas:

• Coding fundamentals: Do you have a strong grasp of important data structures and algorithms? Can you optimize the space-time complexity of your solutions?
• Code quality and maintainability: Can you catch your own mistakes? Do you have a testing plan in place to ensure your solution is working as planned? Are you naming variables appropriately? Is your code human-readable?
• Experience with large datasets: LinkedIn products serve nearly a billion users. Coding questions may assess your ability to deal with large datasets requiring novel spatial/mathematical calculations. Be sure to practice graph questions before this interview.
• Communication: Can you articulate your ideas and concepts? Do you know how to ask the right questions to get to the root of a problem? Can you explain why your solution is good?

How to prepare

The best preparation for coding interviews is practice. It’s better to practice solving many different types of DS&A questions rather than getting good at one or two types.

For a more in-depth review, review our Data Structures and Algorithms Course to learn strategies for breaking DS&A questions down.

For LinkedIn frontend and UI design questions in particular, be sure to review graphs and trees (data structures) and graph search algorithms. If you’re new to coding interviews, it’s helpful to watch real SWEs at companies like Meta, Google, and more work through coding questions. Start here:

• Watch David, a frontend engineer at Uber implement a JavaScript Promise.all() function.
• Watch Lewin, a SWE at Dropbox, answer a question about how to find the best times to buy and sell stocks.
• Watch Chance, an ex-Google and Microsoft SWE write a function to print all the words from the dictionary that can be found on a Boggle board.

Here are some additional tips for acing coding interviews:

• Stick to a schedule. Block out regular intervals to practice writing code. Time yourself to get through coding challenges in up to 20 minutes.
• Ask questions before you start. Many candidates jump into a solution before fully exploring the problem space. Before you write your first line of code, fully understand the problem. Ask clarifying questions and break the problem into digestible chunks, if needed.
• Talk through your entire solution. Interviewers want to see how you think. Practice speaking out loud while you solve practice problems.

System Design

Next, you’ll have an hour-long system design round where you’ll be expected to lead the conversation given a vague prompt such as “Design Netflix.” As a frontend engineer, you’ll likely be asked to design an app that has a heavy client component, but questions vary. Common questions include:

• Design a configurable UI for an e-commerce website.
• Design a service or product API.
• Design an e-commerce filter spanner system to allow users to filter on combinations of options like price, brand, color, ratings, etc.

You’ll be expected to scope the problem, identify functional and non-functional requirements, choose appropriate components and APIs, design a high-level system, evaluate edge cases, and consider scalability, robustness, and efficiency.

What are LinkedIn system design interviewers looking for?

Overall, your interviewers want to see that you can design a frontend system that performs as expected, is secure, and delights customers.

You should be able to speak about things like security around data transport between client/server as well as ways to optimize client performance. Consider principles of good design as well. Recent LinkedIn interviewees advise thinking about your favorite features in the apps/websites you use often. Try to design them yourself, from problem statement all the way through to edge cases and scaling.

How to prepare

If you haven’t interviewed recently, your CS and system design fundamentals may be rusty. Check out Exponent’s Fundamentals of System Design course for a thorough refresher and many real-world mock interviews. Get comfortable discussing:

• Usability: How will you quickly assess the end user’s experience with the system or product? How will you pivot to address changing needs?
• Security: Can your design survive DDOS, spoofing, tampering, repudiation, etc.?
• Availability: How does your design handle failures?
• Scalability: How will your design handle changes in traffic?
• Operational characteristics: How will you diagnose or debug problems when they occur?

You’ll have an hour to clarify the problem, design your system, and assess your solutions. We recommend you practice the following framework, timing yourself until you’ve got a sense of how long each step takes you.

• First, define the problem. Ask clarifying questions until you thoroughly understand the task and have a concrete set of requirements. Don’t neglect the non-functional requirements that will affect end-users, as this is key for frontend engineers especially.
• Then design a high-level system. Start simple and expand later if needed.
• Deep dive into the component-level decisions. Explain each component choice (emphasizing the APIs) and the data model. Whiteboard your design, articulating your thought process throughout.
• Identify bottlenecks and scale your system.
• Finally, review your design. Run through your requirements again, suggest any changes you’d make given more information, summarize tradeoffs, and answer any questions.

For more in-depth prep, check out our system design interview course and try your hand at some practice system design questions in our interview question database.

Frontend Design

The frontend design round is meant to simulate a real mini-project. You’ll have an hour to build a working app or a piece of a sample user interface.

Unlike the system design and coding interviews at LinkedIn, you won’t whiteboard for this round. You’ll use a real platform. For example, if you’re interviewing for an iOS/Android position, you’ll work in Xcode or Android Studio. Web specialists will work in an IDE.

What are LinkedIn frontend design interviewers looking for?

You’ll be asked something simple, like “Build a dark mode toggle for your website” or “Build a simple calendar application.” The expectation is that you (with the help of the interviewer—they are there as your collaborator) agree on a set of requirements and features, design the app or interface, and end the hour with a working product or feature. You’re free to use Google or access documentation, but the use of tools like StackOverflow or AI assistants is not recommended.

Overall, interviewers are evaluating your:

• Proficiency with tooling
• Experience using software developer kits (SDKs)
• Languages/platforms/tools that frontend developers use on the job
• Ability to build something workable given vague requirements

How to prepare

Similar to coding interviews, the best preparation is to practice building real apps and interfaces. Here are some ideas for small projects to try:

Design a search bar at the top of a homepage for your favorite website. Design Google Calendar. Design a chat app for an e-commerce company to handle customer service.

Frontend engineers recommend using the RADIO framework to answer these questions. Here are the steps:

• Requirements Exploration: Understand the problem thoroughly and determine the scope by asking clarifying questions.
• Architecture/High-level Design: Identify the key components of the product and how they are related to each other.
• Data Model: Describe the various data entities, the fields they contain, and which component(s) they belong to.
• Interface Definition (API): Define the interface (API) between components in the product, the functionality of each API, their parameters, and responses.
• Optimizations and Deep Dive: Discuss possible optimization opportunities and specific areas of interest when building the product.

Be sure to leave time to review your solution. Consider:

• Outstanding performance questions: How will your solutions scale?
• Overall user experience: How well does your solution fit the requirements defined? What would you improve if you had more time?
• Network questions: Are there any nuances to be considered in your API choices?
• Security: How secure is your solution?

Behavioral

Finally, you’ll face an hour-long behavioral round where you’ll discuss your experience, your career goals, and how you’re a fit for LinkedIn’s company culture. Your interviewer will be a hiring manager from the engineering organization—not necessarily your prospective manager.

Expect questions like:

What are LinkedIn behavioral interviewers looking for?

Behavioral interviews mainly assess your ability to lead and collaborate effectively on a team. These questions help the interviewer assess how you might add to LinkedIn’s culture.

How to prepare

To prepare for behavioral interviews, first review LinkedIn's core values. When reviewing your resume and crafting your narratives for behavioral interviews, focus on actions you took that mesh with these values:

• We put members first. Every day, when making decisions large and small, we will always prioritize doing the right thing for our members, to make them more productive and successful.
• We trust and care about each other. We always start from a position of trust. We recognize every professional interaction is a chance to practice respect, compassion, honesty, and integrity.
• We are open, honest, and constructive. By seeking the truth and keeping it real, we are more likely to generate solutions to difficult problems. We welcome and seek constructive feedback so we can learn and grow.
• We act as One LinkedIn. This is our company and we operate together against our single vision: to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Each of us is responsible for making decisions as owners: prioritizing the whole over any part, embracing doing good along with doing well, and realizing that we have an outsized impact and win when we move forward together.
• We embody diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Every one of us is responsible for creating an environment where diverse perspectives and experiences are sought and valued and where everyone has the opportunity to thrive. We believe talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not, and we realize our responsibility both on our platform and in our company to create a more equitable and inclusive world of work.
• We dream big, get things done, and know how to have fun. We are driven by the massive responsibility we have embraced to create economic opportunity for every professional, company, and society. We know that we have to constantly innovate and push big ideas while also delivering value every day. Through it all, we act with humility and find joy in working together on something that matters so much.

It can be hard to predict behavioral questions, so we recommend preparing a story bank to pull from. As you tweak your story bank and prep for common behavioral questions, ask yourself:

• What do I do to ensure that my actions align with my team and my company?
• Why do I want to work at LinkedIn? What about LinkedIn’s vision resonates best with me?
• How have I shown leadership in my past projects and personal relationships?
• How have I been an effective communicator and collaborator? What has my experience taught me, and what will I bring to LinkedIn?

Use the STAR framework to keep answers succinct and straightforward, but be cautious of practicing to the point you sound robotic. Interviewers want to see authenticity.

Don’t forget to check out Exponent’s behavioral question bank and the behavioral interviewing for SWEs course. There are hundreds of questions and answers ready for practice. When ready, we recommend signing up for a peer-to-peer behavioral mock interview facilitated by Exponent. They run twice daily.

Sample Interview Questions

Coding: Data Structures and Algorithms

System Design & Frontend System Design

• Design a configurable UI for an e-commerce website.
• Design a service or product API.
• Design an online chess game.
• Design a dark-mode toggle for a website.
• Design a calendar app.

Behavioral

Tips and Strategies

• Invest time into studying code. Don’t let the coding interview stress you out. Practice plenty of sample questions with a timer while narrating your process—practice writing code in a plain text doc for the most realistic experience.
• Communication, communication, communication. Remember to communicate. SWEs at LinkedIn work at the intersection of multiple teams, so your ability to communicate as a team player is crucial.
• Ask questions. It can feel daunting at first, but LinkedIn is interested in curiosity and forthrightness in interviewees. Ask clarifying questions during technical rounds, and don’t be afraid to ask interviewees about LinkedIn life and culture. This signals interest, forges connections with interviewers, and helps you stay on track when answering questions.

FAQs

• Does LinkedIn offer internships? Yes! LinkedIn offers technical, business, and creative internships for students, as well as the Year Up program for underserved young adults and the LinkedIn Scholars program for academics and researchers. Check out LinkedIn's internship resources for more details.
• Does LinkedIn negotiate on salary? Candidates should always negotiate an offer. To get the best initial offer, do well in your system design and frontend interviews. Leveling is often determined in these rounds.