I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok in Feb 2024
Interview
It started with a recruiter call where they explained the position and set up the coding screens.
Very unstructured and it doesn't seem like they have a clue how their interview process feels from a candidate's point of view. There was no explanation from the recruiter about the structure of the coding screens. Going into it I had no clue if I needed to get compiling and I didn't even know the interviewer's name.
The coding screen was one large problem with multiple LC subproblems where you have to get it to compile and write you own test cases.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Directed graph traversal & top K elements max heap
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.
Four Round Process
Phone Interview with Human Resources
Coding Round; 1 DSA Leetcode Medium Q
Coding Round: 2 DSA Leetcode Medium Q
Manager Round: System Design Q and behavioural Q
It took about four weeks from application to offer, longer than I initially expected. The initial phone screen was straightforward, covering my resume and some basic algorithms. Then came the technical rounds, which were challenging. One question on minimum window substrings had me diving into a sliding-window approach using pointers and hashmaps. Funny enough, I recognized it mid-round as something I’d practiced on PracHub just days before. After a final system design discussion, I received the offer and happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given two strings s and t, return the minimum window substring of s that contains every character of t including duplicates, or an empty string if no such window exists. Walk through the sliding-window approach using two pointers and a character-frequency hashmap, analyze the O(|s| + |t|) time complexity, and discuss how to adapt it when t contains characters not present in s or when s arrives as a stream that cannot be fully buffered.
