READ. UNDERSTAND. PRACTICE.
Prepare for your next interview.
Explore algorithm tutorials, coding and system design questions, interview experiences, and computer science study guides.
20,926 resources · Page 334 of 872
Interview experiences · TikTok
TikTok Intern Product Manager Interview Experience — Four Rounds, Manager Round Was the Toughest
Getting through all 4 rounds of the intern interview process was genuinely not easy. After I finished, I felt like my English and my structured way of speaking had leveled up dramatically. I got the interview invite from HR on LinkedIn. After we scheduled a call, they walked me through the role details and the interview process. Round 1: Full self-introduction in English. For the questions after…
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…