TikTok Machine Learning Engineer Graduate interview questions

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.

I went through 5 interviews alternating between technical and hr/soft-skilss after each round. The process took around a month. The machine learning questions were quite basic and revolved around live-coding exercises where you implemented parts of algorithms (like the knn) live. The final interview was a bit weird. I had been a finalist with one other person and the team leader did the interview. I answered questions that didn't have a concrete answer, so if you were on theme you could argue many possible solutions for a specific problem. The interviewer did not like my approaches and advocated the use of a certain paper that they had co-authored. It was quite a bad ending to a good but otherwise tiring interview process. In the end I wouldn't want to work for someone who imposed their view on me, especially in problems that are open research questions.