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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · ByteDance
TikTok Intern Software Engineer Interview Experience — Agent Metrics, Tool Debugging, and Graphs
The interviewer opened with, "Do you speak Chinese?" After I said yes, we spoke Chinese for the entire interview. I gave a brief introduction, then we went straight into questions. Fundamentals / business design Memory and virtual memory: Follow-up: What is virtual memory for? Follow-up: Can virtual memory space (VRAM) be larger than physical memory (RAM)? The reasoning we discussed: Yes. Virtual…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Intern Software Engineer Interview Experience — AI Agent Second Round in Mandarin
TikTok SWE AI Agent Intern, second-round interview report. This was the second round, and the entire conversation was in Mandarin. I started with a self-introduction, followed by a deep dive into my research project. Fundamentals / business design How HTTPS works. Explain the TLS/SSL handshake process and CA certificate validation in detail. Follow-up: During data transmission, is symmetric or as…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Great First Two Rounds, Then a Hostile HM Round and a Ghosting
Quick summary: Round 1: LeetCode 300 + resume questions. Round 2: LeetCode 403 + resume questions. Round 3: resume only. TL;DR: all high-frequency questions, grind them, and talk through your resume well. If you don't want to read the rant, feel free to skip out now — what follows is my personal venting, and I need to get it off my chest. The first two rounds felt like they were with people actua…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok New Grad Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Three Technical Rounds, Pulled From the Pool
(Project questions omitted) Round 1: Our current business needs a multimodal large model to caption videos — how do you ensure deployment stays within compute and memory constraints? Follow-up: if you already have captions and embeddings, and a brand advertiser wants to quickly find relevant videos to watermark, how would you speed that up? What is overfitting, and how do you mitigate it? Coding:…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience — Round 2 Was BQ Plus a DP Video-Scheduling Problem
Round 1 went pretty smoothly, and they told me about round 2 the next day — this round also wrapped up well. After a self-introduction, the interviewer moved into behavioral questions, mostly digging into my resume: briefly describe your internship project, what you learned from it, what was the most challenging project, how communication worked within the project team, what role you played, and…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Product Manager interview: detailed resume and project drilling
After applying, I started with a recruiter conversation centered on my resume. The recruiter walked through it with me, and the interview team made it clear that I needed to know my own CV inside out. Later interviews went deeper into the projects I had listed. I got detailed follow-up questions about specific decisions, my reasoning, and what happened as a result. My sense was that the exact for…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Completed Problems and Unexpected IDE Timeouts
Someone contacted me through a professional network, so I treated the interview as practice and a chance to see the market. The two questions were LeetCode 159 and 93. I stumbled a little on the problems, but I did write both solutions. Their Python coding IDE was very bad. It timed out several times, which made me think I had written an infinite loop, but the environment was actually just runnin…
Interview experiences · TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop Software Engineer interview: coding explanations and detailed follow-ups
After a recruiter call, I went through a short series of online interviews. We started with my background and projects, then moved to a medium LeetCode-style question. I had to explain my approach and why I'd chosen it. The interviewer kept returning to the details, almost walking through every step again, and I grew more nervous as the questions continued. The coding itself felt manageable. When…
Interview experiences · TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop Software Engineer Interview Experience: A disputed reasoning path
I started strongly in the sense that I solved the main LeetCode problem as well as I could, but the interview quickly became uncomfortable. The interviewer kept pulling me into the details of what I said and how I justified it. What threw me off was that, after I gave what felt like a solid answer, the interviewer pushed a sub-optimal approach as the right direction. The repeated follow-ups made…
Interview experiences · TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop Software Engineer interview: KPI, SQL and incident scenarios
The interviewer first asked whether I had questions, then I gave a brief introduction. It quickly turned into a question about setting KPIs for the role, followed by troubleshooting and incident scenarios about user tickets. I was asked how I would investigate a page that would not load for a person new to the platform, what early signs could point to an access-permission cause, and how I would i…
Interview experiences · TikTok Shop
TikTok Shop Software Engineer interview: scheduling issues and timed OA
The process got off to a bad start with scheduling problems that kept moving things around. I felt as though I was always waiting for someone else to show up, and that disruption carried into the technical portion. The assessment had an array medium question and a tougher trie problem with about 45 minutes total. I finished the array question in roughly the first quarter of that time, but the tri…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer C++ performance interview experience
The recruiter screen focused on my background, C++, and performance optimization. A technical coding interview followed on an online platform. I solved algorithmic problems in C++ and explained my approach and complexity analysis. The same session also covered modern C++ and engineering fundamentals, including memory management, multithreading, STL, and performance optimization techniques. The in…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer interview: demanding technical loop
After the initial HR coordination, I went through a longer technical loop that felt more demanding than typical screens I had seen. The interviewers were polite, but the overall impression was that people were stretched. Several interviewers mentioned heavy hours, so it did not feel like a casual conversation. There were several technical rounds, each built around LeetCode-style medium questions,…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer interview experience
HR reached out and the process began smoothly with the usual background conversation. Once I entered interviews, though, repeated rescheduling made the process drag. The delays and back-and-forth were more frustrating than the interview content itself. I eventually stopped waiting because I had received another offer and declined this process. The content was fairly straightforward, but the repea…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience: late reschedule and 25-minute coding sprint
The interview was confirmed for an evening start, then moved less than a day beforehand because of interviewer availability. The earliest replacement was late at night, leaving little time to get focused. It began with a project deep dive, then shifted to live coding. I had to understand two problems, ask clarifying questions, explain my approach, and produce working solutions in roughly 25 minut…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience — Passed Round 1 Coding I Couldn't Solve, Rejected After Round 2
The first round was with a peer based in North America. They opened with some common project questions — what was the hardest part, and how I solved it. Then there was a coding question, a variant of a LeetCode problem. They gave a string and a width. The first part was to split the whole string into lines of that width, then add a suffix to each line saying which line number it is out of the tot…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience — Resume Grilling Turns Into a Surprise 30-Minute Hotel Booking System Design
It started with a self-introduction, then 20 minutes of the interviewer grilling my resume — almost no rote trivia questions, mostly project-related questions, and the interviewer asked at a very high level. Then, very abruptly, I was told I had to spend the remaining thirty minutes finishing a system design question, any diagramming tool I wanted, and I had to share my screen. The functional req…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three VO Rounds, Then Radio Silence After HR
A recruiter reached out to me in July for a team hiring push. I did three rounds of VO interviews, plus one round with a Talent Partner about salary expectations. Feedback on every earlier round came back fast, basically the next day, but ever since the HR call it's been almost a week with no word — feels like I've been shelved in the talent pool. I really don't want to give up, but there doesn't…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Weekly USDS Rounds Ending in Rejection
The rounds were basically scheduled one per week. 1st round, coding: Use round-robin scheduling to process tasks. Each task has a task_id, seller_id, tier (VIP or STANDARD), and priority (1 is high and 3 is low). Within one seller's backlog, tasks with smaller priority numbers must be processed first. Tasks with the same priority follow their arrival order, using FIFO. Across sellers, use weighte…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Technical Screens, Rejected After a Rushed Final Coding Round
Interviewed a couple months ago. First round was with a North America-based peer. They started off asking some common project questions - what the difficult parts were, how I solved them. Then one coding question, a variant of a LeetCode-style problem. They gave a string and a width. The first part was to split the whole string into lines of that width, and then append a suffix to each line sayin…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer interview: projects, systems topics and TreeNode DP
The opening was either a brief resume and role discussion or a direct start to the technical conversation, but it consistently set the direction first. I was asked about my background and then given a coding problem. Early topics included iOS development, backend work, Java, networking, and distributed systems. The interview then narrowed to a LeetCode-style TreeNode and DP challenge. The intervi…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Software Engineer interview: troubleshooting, SQL and ticket prioritization
After I connected with the recruiter, the process moved slowly and felt disorganized. There were timing problems, including a reschedule when the hiring manager did not show up. The pace was the hardest part for me to tolerate. Once the technical interview happened, I introduced myself and discussed how I would approach the role, including what KPIs I would set. I then worked through practical tr…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Solutions Engineer interview: resume discussion and LeetCode questions
The process was fairly direct. After a recruiter-style introduction about my background, the first technical interview covered my resume and behavioral questions before moving to a LeetCode medium problem in a usual interview format. The early rounds followed that pattern, with behavioral questions and one LeetCode problem each time. The interviewers were encouraging and wanted to hear how my pro…
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok SRE Interview Experience — One-Hour Technical Screen Covering K8s, SLOs, and LeetCode 94
Interview process Overall it was a technical interview lasting about 1 hour The interviewer was pretty friendly, but the questions covered a wide range — felt like they were testing general SRE skills plus coding fundamentals Interview content Kubernetes Asked some basic K8s principles, like the difference between Pod and Deployment, and what a Service does. Also asked how to debug a Pod that fai…