I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok in Dec 2024
Interview
The entire interviews were two rounds and were talked in Chinese. Asked about the details about resume with general ML question. And the last 30 mins are two leetcode questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1: Fink k largest number in an array.
2: Find the median of a linked list.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at TikTok in Apr 2024
Interview
I had two rounds of interview. Both followed the same format. Comprised two parts - an interview and a coding question of 30 minutes each. For my first round was asked a Leetcode hard about Streaming Median Finding - LC295 and the questions about my resume and how Diffusion Models work.
The second interview was a similar format. Although the questions were about ML System Design - the interviewer could not speak English and had connection issues, so he kept disconnecting every one minute. Which was not the best interview experience. He dismissed all my answers very curtly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Recommender Algorithm System Design (Machine Learning System Design)
I applied through official website for ML Engineer (Tiktok Multimedia) PhD Intern Summer 2025. The first round was coding round. ~55 mins of coding and then 5 mins of discussion about my interests. It was a hard problem (outside of Leetcode). I was not able to give the most optimized solution, but I spoke out loud and somehow still got invited for the next round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Hard coding problem where height of dam was given and height of river bed was given (increasing order), and we have to decide where to put the dam so that the capacity of water stored is maximized.