I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok (Singapore) in Mar 2023
Interview
HR screening and call, followed by 3 rounds, which are usually deep dive into past projects/work and Leetcode questions, although there may be system design as well. There is then one last behavioral screening round. Some interviewers are friendly, others are just rude. Most of them prefer to interview in Mandarin, which makes explaining difficult if you are not proficient at the language, or be stuck in communicating with broken English.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Leetcode medium to hard, questions on binary search, stack (e.g. valid parenthesis string with wildcard), linked lists (e.g. LRU cache, merge K sorted), graphs (e.g. count islands) and DP (e.g. decode ways). Lots of grinding needed to be familiar with the algorithms as you have to answer 2-3 questions in each round so you have to be fast.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at TikTok
Interview
- recruiter asked me to speak in Chinese for latter half of screen
- 1st round was algo interview
- 2nd round was algo and system design
- didn't move forward after second round
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- 1st round was simple 1D dp problem
- 2nd round was graph problem (Djikstra's) and ML system design
2 rounds coding a lot of background questions very strange behavior from interviewer camera was off and asked questions in mandarin, leetcode medium-hard and very very slow communication from recruiters based in asia for an english role
OA - 1 arrays Medium, 1 Trie Hard. I had 45 minutes to complete that. I was able to do the medium in about 15-20 minutes but I am not that great with trie ds so I was not able to finish.