TikTok Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Technical Screens, Rejected After a Rushed Final Coding Round

TikTok·Software Engineer·Jul 2025
Technical ScreenRejectedmedium

Interviewed a couple months ago. First round was with a North America-based peer. They started off asking some common project questions - what the difficult parts were, how I solved them.

Then one coding question, a variant of a LeetCode-style problem. They gave a string and a width. The first part was to split the whole string into lines of that width, and then append a suffix to each line saying which line number it was out of the total, like 1/8, 2/8. The follow-up was: what if the suffix length also has to count toward the width? Since the suffix length varies, if you process the string line by line you don't know the total number of lines ahead of time. I still don't know how to do this to this day - I didn't manage to say it out loud, but the interviewer passed me anyway.

Second round was with a Beijing-based interviewer. They started by diving deep into my project for a full 40 minutes, really digging into the details - what the data was, which team I worked with, whether I led anyone, how I did the metrics, what the final results were. Then for the next 10 minutes they gave a system design question on a flash-sale system, asking how to solve the core problem of grabbing limited tickets. In the last 5 minutes there was a coding question, a Candy Crush-style matching game, but there wasn't enough time to write it out, so I just talked through my approach. I thought the interview went well, but I ended up getting rejected.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
TikTok
Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Technical Screen
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Jul 2025
Questions from this interview
1 question

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