ByteDance TikTok USDS SRE Interview Experience — Coding Round Caught Me Off Guard, Rejected

ByteDance·Site Reliability Engineer·Apr 2026
Technical ScreenRejectedmedium

I mass-applied online. They reached out within 1-2 days, and the interview got scheduled right away.

The first round was pretty easy — a binary search type problem, not from LeetCode. Find something in a sorted array. I spent a good chunk of the remaining time just chatting with the interviewer about the company.

For the second round I was expecting behavioral/fundamentals stuff — Linux/network/k8s or whatever (that's what the previous interviewer told me, and what I'd seen online). But after a bit of chat about my project, they said we'd be doing coding problems... not hard, but I was a little caught off guard lol.

I didn't do well on the first one — it was like adding 1 to a number represented as an array (the classic "plus one" problem). The second question was the classic "move zeroes" LeetCode problem.

Just got the email saying I didn't pass. Honestly expected it — for the second round, the interviewer didn't seem too satisfied with my initial solution on the first question and kept giving me hints to nudge me toward the version they understood/wanted lol. In the end it passed the visible test cases, but there might have been hidden ones I missed. For the second question I only had 15 minutes left, so I blitzed through it...

Move on!

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

Practice the questions from this interview

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Interview at a glance

Company
ByteDance
Role
Site Reliability Engineer
Rounds
Technical Screen
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Apr 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

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