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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance New Grad Data Scientist Interview Experience — Four HackerRank OA Questions, Cleared in One Pass
TikTok (ByteDance) 2026 new-grad OA on HackerRank, four questions, cleared all of them in one pass. Q1: Given a string, ignoring case, count how many positions have s[i] != s[i+1]. Just walk through it once. Q2: Simulate addition — for each digit, add the digit's contribution directly into the answer. Straightforward simulation, that's all it takes. Q3: Given a 0/1 array, you need to support two…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience — Backend Fundamentals, Databases, and One DFS Problem
First round: technical interview. The interviewer was based in China. The interview leaned toward backend fundamentals, databases, middleware, and web protocols, followed by one algorithm problem. Deep dive into resume projects The interviewer asked about past projects on my resume, focusing on project architecture, the reasons for technical choices, and implementation details from the business l…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience — TikTok E-commerce First Round: Tic-Tac-Toe Game-Over Check Pushed Down to O(1)
Team: e-commerce Interview language: Chinese Round: first round It went straight into coding. I had GPT reconstruct the coding question, so just bear with it: The problem is a modified version of LeetCode 348 Design Tic-Tac-Toe. The difference is that it doesn't ask you to design a TicTacToe class and move(). Instead you're given the current n x n board directly and you implement GameOver(board)…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance Product Manager Interview Experience — Passed Every Round Within 3 Hours, Skip-Level Manager Round Next
New here, sharing my fresh interview experience from the last few days. Gotta say, ByteDance's efficiency is really something — for every round, I got notified I passed just 3 hours after the interview ended. Want to ask everyone on the forum: what should I watch out for in the +2 skip-level manager interview? Product Manager round (very short, ~15 min questions) Self-introduction My most success…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance Product Manager Interview Experience — Phone Screen and a Tough Senior PM Case Round
These are some interview questions from memory. If there's a follow-up I'll keep updating this. Phone Screening (~15 minutes) Self-introduction Asked how my experience matched the role Asked about my willingness to relocate Asked about salary My turn to ask questions Business Round 1 - Senior PM (~40 minutes) Self-introduction Asked what I did at Company A Dug deep into the projects I worked on a…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance Product Manager Interview Experience — TikTok Ecosystem Questions, Rejected Two Days Later
The first step was a take-home assignment with three questions: one about TikTok's ecosystem, and two more that were kind of behavioral-style. About a week after I submitted it, they scheduled an interview with me. They didn't say how many rounds there would be. I was originally scheduled with a director, but then got rescheduled to a team lead instead. The interview was entirely in English, and…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — AI QA Workflow Design and an Unfinished Merge Intervals
Good luck to everyone. I hope my bad example can help someone. Location: San Jose Role: Senior SDE, Quality Platform & AI Test Automation Interviewer: The team's QA leader; the interview was in Chinese over video with a shared whiteboard. Background: More than ten years in DevOps and engineering productivity. I have built CI/CD platforms and an AI code-review platform. How the interviewer framed…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
ByteDance Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Onsite Rounds, Then Ghosted
Sharing my full TikTok/ByteDance (TT) loop. I interviewed at the 2-2 level. Round 1 was coding: Word Search II, with a tech lead — probably a 3-1 or 3-2. The experience was good, no different from a big-tech interview, and his English was good too. The call software had a built-in coding pad. I nailed it with a trie, ran it to test it, no problems. I don't think they have a fixed question bank fo…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
ByteDance Senior+ Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Easy Rounds, Then a Camera-Off Grilling in Chinese
ByteDance's recruiter scheduled my interviews one round at a time, and never told me in advance what any round would actually cover — I only ever found out the time and length of the next round. Round 1: The interviewer was based in the Bay Area. He gave me a problem about the longest subarray of consecutive 1s — a sliding window problem I solved in seconds — with a follow-up on the 2D version. I…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance Site Reliability Engineer Interview Experience — A TinyURL Question With No Hints
We spent the first half hour going through my resume — work experience and projects. It was the kind of technical background conversation that doesn't have a standard answer: why I got promoted at my current company, what key projects I worked on, how I determined that the database system I was responsible for was stable, what tools I'd written before, that kind of thing. For the last 25 minutes…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance Software Engineer Interview Experience — Alien Dictionary and One Costly Indentation Bug
The problem was Alien Dictionary. I expected the interviewer to ask about my background in detail, but the interview opened directly with a LeetCode problem. I knew how to solve this one, but I could not write it bug-free. I eventually found that I had indented a break statement in the wrong place. I managed to get my own test to pass before the interview ended, but the interviewer's feedback was…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance Software Engineer Interview Experience — Five Onsite Rounds in Two Days, Two Hards, and a Last-Minute Add-On Round
Five rounds plus one add-on round, the most intense interview I've had this year. Fair warning up front: the intensity here is not the same league as other places. Five rounds packed into two days, two of them straight-up hard, and then they tacked on an extra round at the last minute. By the evening after I finished I was basically wrecked. Some interviewers were Chinese, some were not. All the…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance Software Engineer Interview Experience — LRU Cache with a TTL Twist, Passed With Unfinished Code
TikTok engineer position, first round (technical screen). A variant of the classic LRU Cache problem (LeetCode 146). First the interviewer introduced themselves, then asked me to introduce myself. Then the interviewer asked: why are you looking to switch jobs, and why TikTok. Then it was on to coding — the classic LRU Cache problem, but with an extra requirement: support for TTL. Specifically, TT…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance Software Engineer Interview Experience — Merge Intervals, Then Course Schedule
The interviewer was looking over my resume while I gave my self-introduction, and after I finished he asked about a project from my background — a project building a model, and he asked about offline evaluation for the model. Coding: given a set of time-window intervals, merge all overlapping intervals. Input: [[1,3],[2,6],[8,10]], output: [[1,6],[8,10]]. My approach: first sort by each interval'…
Interview experiences · Bytedance
Bytedance Software Engineer Interview Experience — Passed Round 1, Failed Round 2 After Solving Two of Three Problems
Round 1 was a coding round with the interviewer, and the experience was great. It was conducted in English, one hour total: the first five minutes were quick self-introductions, then 45 minutes of coding, and the last 10 minutes were for me to ask questions. The problem was a LeetCode question — the exact name was obscured in the original post, but it involved some kind of transformation. I walke…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance Software Engineer Interview Experience — Rejected After a TikTok Trust & Safety System Design Round on a Video Moderation Pipeline
Interviewed in June. Second round: system design interview, 1 hour. Project deep-dive (about 20 minutes). System Design — Video Content Moderation System Question: design a simplified video content moderation system. The interviewer scoped it very clearly: I didn't need to design the video upload part — assume there's already a system that pushes uploaded videos to you. What I needed to design wa…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Rounds and an HR Call, Then Silence
I interviewed with TT USDS: three rounds, then an HR call, and then I never heard anything back. I don't know whether I got rejected. Round 1: two coding questions, LeetCode 3 and LeetCode 210. Round 2: a variant of LeetCode 207. I forgot how it was changed. For the rest of the time they kept asking me tech questions about monitoring, tracing, and telemetry. Round 3: system design. Design a payme…
Interview experiences · ByteDance
ByteDance TikTok USDS SRE Interview Experience — Coding Round Caught Me Off Guard, Rejected
I mass-applied online. They reached out within 1-2 days, and the interview got scheduled right away. The first round was pretty easy — a binary search type problem, not from LeetCode. Find something in a sorted array. I spent a good chunk of the remaining time just chatting with the interviewer about the company. For the second round I was expecting behavioral/fundamentals stuff — Linux/network/k…
Interview experiences · C3 AI
C3 AI Data Scientist Interview Experience — Broad Topics, Fast Answers, and a Rejection
Problem Solving How would you predict the amount of food to keep in storage? This was a fairly basic data science case. ML / Algorithms Bias-variance tradeoff Curse of dimensionality Bagging versus boosting PCA Autoencoders Gradient descent How to keep gradient descent from getting stuck in a local minimum How to evaluate RAG Transformers versus RNNs How to calculate the complexity of attention s…
Interview experiences · C3 AI
C3 AI Data Scientist Interview Experience — The Coding Interviewer Never Appeared
This company still has an online OA, which I found a little surprising. It included some multiple-choice questions, and the last problem was a divide-and-conquer problem, LeetCode 395. In the first-round HM interview, the kind interviewer let me through. Second round: A 30-minute ML system-design interview. The interviewer asked me to design a shop-logistics system. Grocery-store products spoil e…
Interview experiences · C3 AI
C3 AI Data Scientist Interview Experience — The Coding Round Did Not Match Earlier Reports
Process: OA → HR BQ → ML Case → ML Knowledge → Coding, for four interview rounds in total. I should be done here. OA: The same questions as the 2023 version on the forum. If you read through the interview reports here from beginning to end, you should basically be fine. HM BQ: The questions went into more detail than I expected. There were a lot of self-evaluation questions, such as what I though…
Interview experiences · C3 AI
C3 AI Intern Data Scientist Interview Experience — ML Multiple Choice and Production Request Scheduling
Question 1: Vanishing Gradient Which of the following is NOT a potential solution to the vanishing gradient problem in a deep neural network? Adding skip connections to the neural network architecture Using a different activation function like ReLU Raising the learning rate Adding Batch Normalization between layers Question 2: Boosting Classification For the classification problem, Boosting is wi…
Interview experiences · C3 AI
C3 AI New Grad FDE Interview Experience — Three Multiple-Choice Questions and Two Coding Problems
Three multiple-choice questions and two coding questions on HackerRank, with no camera required. Multiple-choice questions Time Complexity Hash There are 7 computers in a network (numbered from 0 to 6). Each network request is assigned to one of those computers. Hash function used for that is: H(id) = id % 7 Which computer will have maximum load if the request ids are... A retrieval augmented gen…
Interview experiences · C3 AI
C3 AI Software Engineer Interview Experience — One Interviewer No-Show, One Walked Out Mid-Interview
I mass-applied online, and HR reached out to set up an interview directly — there was no HR phone screen first. They never shared the job details or the salary range, and went straight to scheduling a 30-minute behavioral round with the hiring manager. The behavioral round with the manager went okay. I asked him about salary and he had no idea about anything. After getting through the behavioral…