I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at TikTok in Dec 2023
Interview
Summary of the overall poor experience I had:
1. The interviewer hadn't bothered to book a meeting room for the interview
2. The interviewer tried to take the call from a loud communal area (think the kitchen)
3. When I mentioned the level of noise the interviewer told me to "deal with it"
4. I had to push back and tell the interviewer to move to somewhere quiet
5. The interviewer consistently interrupted my answers every couple of sentences of my response - throwing me off
6. I had to keep the interviewer on track during the interview - clarifying if I should move onto subsequent parts of the questions to keep us on time
7. Overall I got the sense that the interviewer hadn't been adequately prepped
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe my experience through a project
Recommendation Cold Start problem
Easy LeetCode Question - median from two sorted arrays
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok in Oct 2023
Interview
In total, I have 2 tech interviews and 1 interview with the HM. Tech interviews are mostly about leetcode questions with follow-ups and CV deep dive as well as research exploration.
Asked to fill out questionnaire on basic information (start date, why interested in Machine Learning, why interested in TikTok, other generic HR questions) over email, then had a technical interview. Technical interview was 1 hour long.