I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2024
Interview
Round 1 & 2
The interview process begins with a 30-minute deep dive into the candidate's resume, during which the interviewer closely examines their experience, skills, and achievements to assess suitability for the role. This is followed by a 15-minute coding session where the candidate is required to write code in the company's integrated development environment (IDE). The objective is to ensure the code compiles successfully and passes all the provided test cases, demonstrating the candidate's technical proficiency and problem-solving skills.
Round 3
HM round. Deep dive of resume.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Round 1, similar to Leetcode 210.
Round 2, a binary search question.
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.
