I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok (San Francisco, CA) in Nov 2023
Interview
The initial interview was with a recruiter who asked general questions about my research and field of study. The second interview was a leet-code style interview. The interview process did not proceed beyond this point.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked me to write code to determine when to buy and sell a stock for maximum profit, given perfect information about its price over time (including the future). You are given a list of numbers indicating the stock's value each day. Each day you can choose to buy or sell.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at TikTok (San Jose, CA) in Mar 2026
Interview
The process started with an HR outreach on LinkedIn, followed by a phone call introducing the team and their work. The main interview focused on my past project experience and included several practical questions related to the team’s business scenarios, as well as one coding question. About a week later, I was told that there was no longer headcount for the role.
They ask a lot about some machine learning architectures and details of prior experience and projects, then they ask a technical question, which could be a machine learning algorithm but if you don't know it they can also ask a regular SWE technical interview question
Call with employee from the ML team. Two technical questions based on statistics and probability. Easy / Average difficulty, around 10-15 min each question. First explained the solution and then coded it. Not much engagement from interviewer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How to sample from a uniforml probability distribution?
