Did the Linear final round (they call it the onsite even though it's remote for most candidates) for a senior engineering role. Sharing the full picture because the public info is pretty thin.
Structure. Four segments back to back with short breaks. Mine ran about four hours total. No lunch break if you're remote, so eat something beforehand.
Sessions: Technical depth (a deep-dive into your background, not a coding problem) Coding round (60 min, live, one problem) System design (60 min, architecture) Values / culture conversation (30-45 min, senior leader)
The technical depth session. This one was different from what I expected. An engineer walked me through their codebase for part of it, then asked me questions about design decisions I'd make in their context. It wasn't abstract. They showed me real (simplified) code and asked how I'd approach changing or extending it. I found this more interesting than the typical abstract design question.
Where I think people get cut. The culture round with the senior leader felt like a real filter. The questions were around how you handle disagreement with leadership, how you deal with ambiguity, whether you're okay working in a lean setup where you own the whole problem. If you need a lot of process or a PM to define every requirement, that's a mismatch they'll detect.
Debrief timing. I heard back within three business days. Offer came about a week after that with a standard exploding deadline (they gave me two weeks, which was reasonable).
The work itself. The interviewers genuinely love what they're building. You can tell. The energy in the final round was different from "processing candidates at scale." That's probably a good sign about the job itself.
Declined the offer for unrelated reasons but the process was one of the better ones I've been through recently.