I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok (Mountain View, CA) in Dec 2021
Interview
I apply for a new grad role in November 2021. And got an Online assessment of four questions, two easy two medium. After two weeks, phone interview: medium follow-up time + space complexity. After a few days, virtual onsite first round: medium and one follow-up time and space complexity. Last, the manager interviewed with some general behavior questions. The whole process took around 2 months.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most of the technical questions are from the coding practice website, such as leetcode.
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.
