ByteDance Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four Rounds on the Infra Team, Verbal Offer Then Rescinded

Four rounds with the TT infra team.

1. Given a graph where every node has a weight, pick a set of nodes such that no two chosen nodes are adjacent, and return the maximum sum.
2. (The question for this round is just an unreadable placeholder in my original notes.)
3. Given a graph, a source and a destination, return whether every path ends at the destination.
4. Project deep dive plus an elementary-school math problem.

Every round also asked AI-related questions, for example how I use AI day to day to work more efficiently, and whether I had done anything to improve my team's efficiency.

All four rounds also threw a huge pile of fundamentals questions at me, including: K8s service IP vs cluster IP vs NodePort, walking through a request from the browser to the internal K8s cluster, DNS TTL vs negative TTL, gRPC vs HTTP, HTTP/1 vs HTTP/2 vs HTTP/3, how to debug a 5xx error, and K8s node vs pod.

All of the interviews were in English, but communication was a struggle. The team I interviewed with works on exactly this kind of stuff. Right after the interviews I got a verbal offer, and the next day they told me someone else had taken it.