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TikTok 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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27 results
- AI Agent Second Round in MandarinTikTok · Software Engineer · Intern · Technical Screen · Sep 2026
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…
- Three Weekly USDS Rounds Ending in RejectionTikTok · Software Engineer · Onsite · Aug 2026Rejected
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…
- Two Completed Problems and Unexpected IDE TimeoutsTikTok · Software Engineer · Senior+ · Technical Screen · Aug 2026Rejected
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…
- Software Engineer interview at TikTokTikTok · Software Engineer · Jul 2026
The recruiter gave me a broad sense of the role and scheduled the interviews, but I could not get much detail about the topics or how many stages remained. HR replied quickly, yet the process structure stayed unclear. The first technical stage was a LeetCode question. A later combined stage included technical discussion plus another LeetCode problem. Once interviewing started, things moved along,…
- TikTok Product Manager interview: detailed resume and project drillingTikTok · Product Manager · Jul 2026
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…
- TikTok Software Engineer C++ performance interview experienceTikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
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…
- TikTok Software Engineer interview experienceTikTok · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Jul 2026Withdrew
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…
- TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience: late reschedule and 25-minute coding sprintTikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
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…
- TikTok Software Engineer interview: demanding technical loopTikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
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,…
- TikTok Software Engineer interview: projects, systems topics and TreeNode DPTikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
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…
- TikTok Software Engineer interview: troubleshooting, SQL and ticket prioritizationTikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
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…
- TikTok Solutions Engineer interview: resume discussion and LeetCode questionsTikTok · Solutions Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2026
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…
- TikTok Data Scientist interview experience: medium SQL and background follow-upsTikTok · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jun 2026In progress
After a smooth recruiter interaction, I went directly to a virtual one-on-one technical interview with someone from the hiring team. It was focused: a medium SQL question tested whether I could read and reason through the query, along with general data-science and machine-learning questions. The SQL was not intended as a trick question, but they wanted to see whether I understood what the code wa…
- Two Rounds, an LRU Cache, and a Cold InterviewerTikTok · Backend Software Engineer · Intern · Onsite · Apr 2026Rejected
Overall, the entire interview process was okay and was not difficult, but I was very disappointed with the second-round interviewer. From beginning to end, that interviewer had a cold attitude, was not very willing to help, and asked questions that were not very clear. I heard that interviewers at TikTok are assigned randomly, so if you are unlucky, you can end up with a poor interviewer. The fir…
- Three Technical Rounds, Pulled From the PoolTikTok · Machine Learning Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Feb 2026
(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:…
- Round 2 Was BQ Plus a DP Video-Scheduling ProblemTikTok · Software Engineer · New Grad · Technical Screen · Jan 2026In progress
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…
- Resume Grilling Turns Into a Surprise 30-Minute Hotel Booking System DesignTikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Nov 2025
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…
- Comment Box Coding Question, Rejected Two Days LaterTikTok · Frontend Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025Rejected
Sharing my recent TikTok front-end phone interview experience. I applied for a front-end position. The recruiter reached out about a week after I applied through the system, and we scheduled a phone screen. The technical phone screen was 1-on-1, 45 minutes of coding. The interviewer spoke English fine, but talked pretty fast. The whole pace was tight — basically no small talk, straight into it. T…
- Great First Two Rounds, Then a Hostile HM Round and a GhostingTikTok · Machine Learning Engineer · Onsite · Sep 2025No response
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…
- One-Hour Technical Screen Covering K8s, SLOs, and LeetCode 94TikTok · SRE · Technical Screen · Sep 2025
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…
- Passed Round 1 Coding I Couldn't Solve, Rejected After Round 2TikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025Rejected
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…
- Recruiter Chaos and a Final Round That Ended Before I Wrote Any SQLTikTok · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025In progress
I interviewed with a team under USDS for a data engineer role. The questions were really weak, so I'm mainly going to focus on the whole process instead. Right now I've just finished one HR round plus three Zoom call rounds. First, I had a friend at TikTok (not on the USDS team) refer me for a bunch of positions, but I only got one rejection back — never heard anything about the rest. Then, almos…
- Recruiter Chaos, a Skipped OA, and a Data Modeling Round With No CodeTikTok · Data Engineer · Technical Screen · Sep 2025In progress
I interviewed for a data engineer role on one of the teams under USDS. The questions were pretty weak, so I'll focus mostly on the process instead. Right now I've just finished one HR round plus three Zoom call interviews. First, I had a friend at TikTok (not on the USDS team) refer me for a bunch of positions, but I only got one rejection back — no response on any of the rest. Then, almost a mon…
- Three VO Rounds, Then Radio Silence After HRTikTok · Software Engineer · HR Screen · Aug 2025No response
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…
- A Hiring Manager Round Built Around One Experimentation CaseTikTok · Data Scientist · Technical Screen · Jul 2025
Round 1: HR screen, pretty much a normal phone screen — confirmed my work experience and visa status. Round 2: Hiring manager. This round had no coding (not sure if that counts as weird...). First 25 minutes: deep dive into my resume, lots of "why" questions about my project experience. Last 25 minutes, the case was: They want to launch an experiment testing a new version of a recommendation algo…
- Four Rounds, Manager Round Was the ToughestTikTok · Product Manager · Intern · Onsite · Jul 2025Offer
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…
- Two Technical Screens, Rejected After a Rushed Final Coding RoundTikTok · Software Engineer · Technical Screen · Jul 2025Rejected
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…
