I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok in Oct 2024
Interview
Was a very smooth and pleasant process. It took a bit under a month from start to finish. They frequently contacted me about the interview process and everyone was enthusiastic. Great experience all around.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Several Leetcode mediums, and basic system design and behavioral questions.
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.
