I applied online. I interviewed at TikTok in Dec 2020
Interview
this is a completely new OA for 2021. The questions are time consuming. Make sure you are very familiar with the language you use for the test. The test cases are tricky, don't expect to pass all of them, just move on to next question if you get stuck in one.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I don't remember all of them.
1. Give 2 strings, Add two numbers.
2. Log file. Find whether there are machine problems based on the log
3. A traveler can choose several routes to different places. Each of the route has time and values. Maximize the values while making sure the traveler can come back.
4. don't remember
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.
