The process begins with behavioural experience questions, followed by deep dives into big data theory. It concludes with a medium-difficulty coding test covering LeetCode style problems and SQL queries. It was overall doable.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is the difference between SQL and NoSQL database?
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at TikTok in Sept 2025
Interview
- Past projects and experiences
- Questions on building data pipelines and data engineering questions
- 1 Leetcode question in chinese (Reverse linked list)
- Interviewer preferred if chinese was the language of communication
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- LC question: Reverse Linked List
- Data Engineering Technical questions
Terrible experience while interviewing for a data engineer job. The interviewer was 15 minutes late. His Chinese accent was so thick I could not hear what he was saying, and had to kindly ask him to repeat himself. I was asked some theory questions about MR, Hadoop, Spark. Then we had a SQL test. The SQL engine was not working, so I was writing code blind, and the test ended on time so I didn't have enough time to complete the questions properly even though all my answers were working just not fancy sql. The interviewer demonstrated a very poor knowledge of sql also, one of the answers I gave had a self-join which would get the answer to work, but he wanted a window function and said my answer would get a NULL when he was outright wrong, I checked ChatGPT to confirm my answer, and my answer would have worked.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Past projects with ETL. Theory questions about Mapreduce, hadoop, spark. Some of these questions were quite obscure like: How does spark process skewed data?
