real interview stories, told over a cup of tea ♡
ByteDance Interview Experiences
3935 interview stories from candidates at 857 companies: how each round went, what was asked and how it ended. Every company page links to practice questions in the same style.
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30 results
- Research Talk, Model Questions and a Fishing Pond Coding ProblemByteDance · Machine Learning Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Oct 2026
First was a self-introduction, then I introduced my research. He said I could share slides if that would make things clearer. I happened to be preparing my proposal recently, so I shared my slides, and it definitely felt better than just talking through it. He asked some questions based on my work, normal follow-ups. Interestingly, he also brought up jev and asked whether I follow it. Then on the…
- E-commerce Backend, One Technical Round Ending on Spiral Matrix Follow-upsByteDance · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
TikTok SWE Intern, E-commerce Backend. Referral. One virtual round. Rejected. Background Applied through a referral. Position and team: E-commerce Backend. Timeline 08/06 applied 08/07 received the OA 08/23 HR scheduled the interview 09/11 first technical round 09/26 got the result (rejected) Round 1, Technical (1 hr) The interviewer spoke Chinese and the whole thing was in Chinese. Self-introduc…
- Failed the TikTok LIVE Phone Screen on Graph ColoringByteDance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
The role came from a TikTok HR reach-out. There was no HR call, they only asked about my sponsorship situation over email and then scheduled a 1-hour phone interview. The interview was on HackerRank. I started with a self-introduction, then a behavioral question: tell me about a challenge. After that came a LeetCode problem, Possible Bipartition: > Split a group of n people (labeled from 1 to n)…
- Rejected After a TikTok Trust & Safety System Design Round on a Video Moderation PipelineByteDance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2026Rejected
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…
- Three Rounds and an HR Call, Then SilenceByteDance · Software Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2026No response
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…
- TikTok E-commerce First Round: Tic-Tac-Toe Game-Over Check Pushed Down to O(1)ByteDance · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Sep 2026In progress
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)…
- Agent Metrics, Tool Debugging, and GraphsByteDance · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
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…
- AI QA Workflow Design and an Unfinished Merge IntervalsByteDance · Senior SDE, Quality Platform & AI Test Automation · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
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…
- Alien Dictionary and One Costly Indentation BugByteDance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
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…
- Backend Fundamentals, Databases, and One DFS ProblemByteDance · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Aug 2026
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…
- Graph Coding Then a Ticket Booking System DesignByteDance · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Aug 2026In progress
Round 1: Coding The first round was coding. The problems were mainly graph / topological sort related. Overall the difficulty was not especially high; if you prepare graph, BFS/DFS and topological sort normally, you should be able to cover it. Round 2: System Design The second round was system design, and the question was to design a ticket booking system (a system for grabbing tickets the moment…
- Five Onsite Rounds in Two Days, Two Hards, and a Last-Minute Add-On RoundBytedance · Software Engineer · Onsite · May 2026
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…
- Coding Round Caught Me Off Guard, RejectedByteDance · Site Reliability Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026Rejected
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…
- Four Difficult Online Assessment QuestionsByteDance · Software Engineer · Intern · Online Assessment · Apr 2026
There were four questions in total, and they were quite difficult. Question 1 Description Given an array of positive integers numbers, calculate how many of its elements have an even number of digits. Note: The solution did not need to be optimal, but a time complexity no worse than O(numbers.length^2) would fit within the execution time limit. Example For numbers = [12, 134, 111, 1111, 10], the…
- LRU Cache with a TTL Twist, Passed With Unfinished CodeBytedance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Apr 2026In progress
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…
- Three Onsite Rounds, Then GhostedBytedance · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026No response
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…
- Two Easy Rounds, Then a Camera-Off Grilling in ChineseBytedance · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
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…
- Four HackerRank OA Questions, Cleared in One PassBytedance · Data Scientist · New Grad · Online Assessment · Mar 2026
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…
- Round Two's Same-Day-Duplicate SQL QuestionBytedance · Data Scientist · Intern · Technical Screen · Mar 2026
This is my write-up for the second round of the TikTok DS interview (I also have a write-up for the first round, but I won't link it here). The interviewer gave a brief self-introduction. Then I introduced myself and walked through my resume. They dug into things like how I did data preprocessing, how I handled the bias/variance tradeoff, and how I chose performance metrics, and then briefly dug…
- XGBoost, DP, and a Fraud-Detection System Design That Didn't LandBytedance · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Mar 2026Rejected
Interview time: February this year. Department: e-commercial team. Round 1: Self-introduction, walked through my projects. A few classic ML Q&A: Q: Why is XGBoost less prone to overfitting than a single decision tree? A: Because it's a gradient-boosting ensemble method (many weak-learner trees), it adds regularization (L1/L2, tree complexity penalties), a learning rate (shrinkage), row/column sub…
- A TinyURL Question With No HintsBytedance · Site Reliability Engineer · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
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…
- DP Problem on Video Selection with an Attention-Span ConstraintBytedance · Data Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Jan 2026In progress
The earlier round 1 also went pretty smoothly, and they notified me about round 2 the next day. This round also wrapped up successfully. The interviewer, after the self-introduction, went straight into a behavioral round — mainly grilling me on my resume: briefly talk about your internship project, what you learned from it, what the most challenging project was, how communication worked within th…
- Interviewer Late Both Rounds, Then RejectedByteDance · Machine Learning Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Rejected
I interviewed with ByteDance's Compliance Team (based in Singapore), for an MLE position. Overall the interview experience was pretty bad. Let me start with the process: Round one: the interviewer was 5 minutes late, then spent about 40 minutes asking about my project in a lot of detail. The coding question was Maximum Product Subarray, which I solved right away. Round two: the interviewer was 15…
- Merge Intervals, Then Course ScheduleBytedance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026
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'…
- Passed Round 1, Failed Round 2 After Solving Two of Three ProblemsBytedance · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Rejected
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…
- Three Onsite Rounds on Multimodal Deployment and DropoutBytedance · Data Scientist · Onsite · Jan 2026
Round 1 Discussed how to deploy a multimodal model when compute and GPU memory are limited. Follow-up: given existing captions and embeddings, how to speed up video retrieval. Asked what overfitting is and how to mitigate it. Coding question: implement a MinStack that returns the minimum in O(1) time. Round 2 Discussed methods to mitigate overfitting in deep learning and how Dropout works. Compar…
- Two Research-Focused Rounds, Then an OfferByteDance · Intern · Technical Screen · Jan 2026Offer
First time sharing. Calling it an "interview report" is generous — it's more just my interview experience. Background: USNews Top 20 AI PhD, 3rd year, working on agent optimization and agentic RL. My publication record is pretty average, nothing that stands out — 2 ACL + 2 KDD + 1 EACL. I interned at Amazon before this. 03.17 Volcano Ark, AML Enterprise - RS team, HR call. Confirmed I could start…
- TikTok Ecosystem Questions, Rejected Two Days LaterBytedance · Product Manager · Technical Screen · Apr 2025Rejected
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…
- Phone Screen and a Tough Senior PM Case RoundBytedance · Product Manager · Onsite · Jan 2025Rejected
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…
- Passed Every Round Within 3 Hours, Skip-Level Manager Round NextByteDance · Product Manager · Technical Screen · Oct 2024In progress
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…