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Interview Questions
Practice 9403 coding, system design and machine learning questions from 546 companies, sorted by role, topic and interview round. Every question has step-by-step hints, a code runner that supports 8 languages and an AI mentor; members also get the full solution walkthrough.
- 9403
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Showing 931–960 of 4616 results
- ByteDanceMediumMachine Learning EngineerMaximize total catch over K hours from ponds whose yield drops after each hour
Given the current hourly catch of each fishing pond and a budget of K hours, where every hour fished at a pond lowers its catch by one, compute the maximum total number of fish. It tests modeling the declining yields, choosing an optimal schedule, and meeting a time bound better than O(K log N) when K is very large.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardData EngineerMaximize watch time under adjacency constraint
This Coding & Algorithms question for a Data Engineer role evaluates dynamic programming and sequence-optimization skills by requiring selection of a subsequence under a pairwise adjacency constraint on video durations, at a moderate-to-advanced algorithmic abstraction level.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerMerge Overlapping Closed Intervals
This problem tests your ability to manipulate sorted data structures and manage interval boundaries to optimize overlapping segments in linear or log-linear time.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenSortingGreedyArray - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerMerge Overlapping Time Windows
Merge unsorted half-open time windows into sorted, non-overlapping intervals while leaving merely adjacent windows separate. Handle duplicate and nested ranges, large timestamps, large input, and empty collections under exact boundary semantics.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerMinimize Increments to Equalize Path Costs
This problem tests your ability to manipulate tree node values to satisfy a global constraint using a bottom-up dynamic programming or greedy approach.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenTreesGreedyRecursion - ByteDanceHardMachine Learning EngineerMinimum Number of Rooms to Host a Set of Possibly Overlapping Meetings
Given meetings as half-open start and end time intervals, compute the minimum number of rooms needed so that no room ever hosts two overlapping meetings. Tests interval reasoning, correct handling of back-to-back meetings that share an endpoint, and an efficient approach for up to 100,000 meetings.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSite Reliability EngineerPlace Non-Attacking Queens
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in combinatorial search, constraint reasoning, and algorithmic design for arranging non-attacking pieces on a grid.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardData ScientistPredict Short-Video Engagement with Skewed Data
Design a short-video engagement model with explicit targets, leakage-safe features, heavy-tail handling, exposure awareness, and temporal evaluation.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumApplied ScientistPresent a Past Project and Defend Its Motivation Under Challenge
A behavioral question for a new-grad research role: present one of your own projects in about 15 minutes and defend its motivation when the interviewer challenges it early. It tests how you frame a problem, back it with evidence and baselines, and respond to pushback calmly.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerPrevent a Cache Stampede on a Hot Key
This question tests the ability to design robust cache-aside mechanisms to prevent database overload during cache expiration events for high-traffic keys.
System DesignTechnical ScreenCachingDistributed SystemsHigh Availability - ByteDanceMediumData ScientistProbability That One Fair Die Beats Another
Solve a coding interview problem about the probability that one fair die beats another when the dice may have different sizes and duplicate face values. The challenge emphasizes strict tie handling and an efficient approach that avoids comparing every possible pair of faces.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerRemove Duplicate Letters Lexicographically
This problem tests your ability to use a monotonic stack combined with frequency tracking to construct a specific subsequence while maintaining lexicographical order.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenStackStringGreedy - ByteDanceEasySoftware EngineerReturn the Most Frequent Integer with a Stable Tie-Breaker
Implement a frequency-based selection over a large integer array: return the most common value, using the numerically smallest value to break ties. Preserve the input and return the value itself rather than its count or position.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerReverse Nodes in K-Sized Groups
This problem tests your ability to manipulate linked list pointers by reversing sub-segments of a list while maintaining structural integrity.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenLinked ListPointersRecursion - ByteDanceMediumMachine Learning EngineerReverse a Linked List in Groups of K
This problem tests your ability to manipulate pointers in a linked list structure and manage iterative or recursive state transitions for fixed-size segments.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenLinked ListPointersAlgorithms - ByteDanceHardBackend EngineerSQL: Students Above Average and Passing Every Subject
This problem tests advanced SQL skills, including the use of window functions, conditional aggregation, and multi-level filtering to identify subsets of data that satisfy both global and per-category criteria.
Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)Technical ScreenSQLAggregationWindow-Functions - ByteDanceMediumSite Reliability EngineerSRE Background: Development vs. Stability Focus and Your Most Memorable Project
This question assesses a candidate's ability to balance rapid feature delivery with system reliability, while evaluating their depth of technical ownership and ability to articulate the impact of their engineering decisions.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical ScreenBehavioralSRESystem Design - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerShortest Path in a Grid with Limited Obstacle Removal
This problem tests your ability to adapt Breadth-First Search (BFS) to a state-space graph where the state includes both spatial coordinates and a remaining resource constraint.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenBFSShortest PathState Space Search - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerSimulate a fixed-capacity least-recently-used cache over get and put operations
Implement a fixed-capacity cache that evicts the least recently used key, processing a sequence of get and put operations and returning the result of every get. Tests recency bookkeeping, update versus insert semantics, eviction order and constant-time operations.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSite Reliability EngineerSolve Stack and String Shift Problems
This problem tests your ability to handle nested validation using stacks and coordinate transformation using modular arithmetic on strings.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical ScreenStackStringsModulo Arithmetic - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerSolve interval merging and histogram area
This question evaluates algorithmic problem-solving skills focused on interval manipulation and histogram-based area computation, emphasizing data structures, ordering, and reasoning about time and space complexity.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerSplit n People Into Two Groups So No Pair Who Dislike Each Other Shares a Group
Given n people and a list of pairs who dislike each other, decide whether everyone can be divided into two groups of any size so that no disliking pair shares a group. The problem tests reasoning about pairwise constraints, people with no constraints, and a solution that runs in time linear in the number of people and pairs.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerTCP vs UDP: Key Differences and the Applications That Suit Each
From a TikTok backend intern interview: compare TCP and UDP, including connection setup, reliability, ordering, flow and congestion control, message boundaries and overhead, and explain which applications suit each protocol. It tests tying transport-layer guarantees and their costs to real application needs.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical Screen - ByteDanceHardSoftware EngineerTell Me About a Challenge You Faced at Work and How You Worked Through It
A behavioral question from a one-hour software engineering phone screen asks you to describe a challenge you faced and how you handled it. It tests whether you can pick a story with real stakes, make your own decisions and reasoning clear, report a concrete result, and reflect on what you would change, all within a few minutes.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumProduct ManagerTell me about your fit
Prepare a TikTok PM career-story answer covering self-introduction, role fit, Company A ownership, project deep dive, job changes, moving to the United States, long-term PM goals, relocation flexibility, metrics, and ecosystem product judgment.
Behavioral & LeadershipTechnical Screen - ByteDanceMediumSoftware EngineerTrace and Debug Agent Tool-Call Failures
Design a distributed observability and tracing system to monitor, debug, and diagnose multi-step agent tool-call failures across retries and execution stages without leaking sensitive data.
System DesignTechnical ScreenDistributed TracingObservabilityAI Agents - ByteDanceEasySite Reliability EngineerTriage a Suddenly Slow Production Service
This question tests your structured approach to incident response and root cause analysis in a distributed production environment.
Software Engineering FundamentalsTechnical ScreenSREIncident ResponseDistributed Systems - ByteDanceEasySite Reliability EngineerValidate Matching Brackets
Tests stack-based parsing fundamentals, early mismatch detection, and linear-time string validation for balanced bracket sequences.
Coding & AlgorithmsTechnical Screenstackstringsparsing - ByteDanceMediumApplied ScientistWrite the Cross-Entropy Loss and Compute Precision, Recall and F1
An ML fundamentals question in two parts: write the cross-entropy loss for binary and multi-class classification and explain why it is used, then compute precision, recall, F1 and accuracy for a described imbalanced classifier. It tests exact formulas, careful arithmetic and metric choice.
Machine LearningTechnical Screen - C3 AIMediumData ScientistChoose Tokenization and Dense or Sparse Retrieval
This problem tests your understanding of document retrieval strategies, specifically comparing sparse and dense representations and how to integrate them into a production RAG system.
Machine LearningTechnical ScreenRAGNLPInformation Retrieval
C3 AI