I want to share what the behavioral portion of the Linear interview felt like, because it's different from what I expected after years of STAR-format prep at larger companies.
Background: I went through their loop for an engineering role, reached the final round. I'm in a fairly deliberate job search right now after some burnout, so I was paying close attention to culture signals.
First: there's no "tell me about a time" opener at Linear. What I got was more conversational. The engineer asked me to walk them through a project I was most proud of, and then spent 30-40 minutes just drilling into it. Not asking scripted follow-ups. Genuinely curious about the decisions.
The questions that came up: Why did you make that architectural call? What were you optimizing for? What would you do differently? When you disagreed with a teammate on this, how did that actually play out? What did you learn from the thing that didn't work?
What I noticed about their values. A few things stood out. They care a lot about ownership in the full-stack sense: did you see a problem and fix it, or did you pass it up the chain? They pushed on situations where I had to make a decision with incomplete information. They seemed to value someone who updates their opinions when they get new data, not someone who defends past decisions.
The culture thing. Linear is known for a high-craft, high-taste culture. That showed up in the behavioral round too. The interviewer lit up when I talked about a time I pushed back on a feature because it added complexity users wouldn't notice. They were less interested in the impact metrics than in the reasoning.
What to prep. One or two projects you know really well, including the things that went wrong. The depth of their questions means surface-level prep doesn't hold up. They'll find the seams.