Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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32 stories

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ByteDanceSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Alien Dictionary and One Costly Indentation Bug

The problem was Alien Dictionary. I expected the interviewer to ask about my background in detail, but the interview opened directly with a LeetCode problem. I knew how to solve this one, but I could not write it bug-free. I eventually found that I had indented a break statement in the wrong place. I managed to get my own test to pass before the interview ended, but the interviewer's feedback was…

Technical Screen0
ByteDanceSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Backend Fundamentals, Databases, and One DFS Problem

First round: technical interview. The interviewer was based in China. The interview leaned toward backend fundamentals, databases, middleware, and web protocols, followed by one algorithm problem. Deep dive into resume projects The interviewer asked about past projects on my resume, focusing on project architecture, the reasons for technical choices, and implementation details from the business l…

Technical Screen0
ByteDanceSenior SDE, Quality Platform & AI Test AutomationSenior+
Aug 2026

AI QA Workflow Design and an Unfinished Merge Intervals

Good luck to everyone. I hope my bad example can help someone. Location: San Jose Role: Senior SDE, Quality Platform & AI Test Automation Interviewer: The team's QA leader; the interview was in Chinese over video with a shared whiteboard. Background: More than ten years in DevOps and engineering productivity. I have built CI/CD platforms and an AI code-review platform. How the interviewer framed…

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BytedanceBackend EngineerNew Grad
Jun 2026

A Rapid-Fire Technical Screen Covering MySQL, Redis, SQL, and a Binary Tree Problem

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OfferTechnical ScreenPremium0
ByteDanceBackend EngineerIntern
May 2026

A Fundamentals Marathon and a Second Shot at an Old Coding Question

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BytedanceSoftware Engineer
May 2026

One "Coding" Round That Was Mostly Resume Deep-Dive

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RejectedTechnical ScreenPremium0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
May 2026

TikTok's Twist on the K-Group List Reversal Problem

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ByteDanceSite Reliability EngineerSenior+
May 2026

A Smooth Project Round Followed by a Rough Linux Screen

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Real-Time Likes System Design, Rejected 3 Days Later

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
May 2026

Five Onsite Rounds in Two Days, Two Hards, and a Last-Minute Add-On Round

Five rounds plus one add-on round, the most intense interview I've had this year. Fair warning up front: the intensity here is not the same league as other places. Five rounds packed into two days, two of them straight-up hard, and then they tacked on an extra round at the last minute. By the evening after I finished I was basically wrecked. Some interviewers were Chinese, some were not. All the…

Onsite0
ByteDanceSite Reliability Engineer
Apr 2026

Coding Round Caught Me Off Guard, Rejected

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/k…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
ByteDanceSoftware EngineerIntern
Apr 2026

Four Difficult Online Assessment Questions

There were four questions in total, and they were quite difficult. Question 1 Description Given an array of positive integers numbers, calculate how many of its elements have an even number of digits. Note: The solution did not need to be optimal, but a time complexity no worse than O(numbers.length^2) would fit within the execution time limit. Example For numbers = [12, 134, 111, 1111, 10], the…

Online Assessment0
BytedanceSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Two Easy Rounds, Then a Camera-Off Grilling in Chinese

ByteDance's recruiter scheduled my interviews one round at a time, and never told me in advance what any round would actually cover — I only ever found out the time and length of the next round. Round 1: The interviewer was based in the Bay Area. He gave me a problem about the longest subarray of consecutive 1s — a sliding window problem I solved in seconds — with a follow-up on the 2D version. I…

RejectedOnsite0
BytedanceSoftware EngineerSenior+
Apr 2026

Three Onsite Rounds, Then Ghosted

Sharing my full TikTok/ByteDance (TT) loop. I interviewed at the 2-2 level. Round 1 was coding: Word Search II, with a tech lead — probably a 3-1 or 3-2. The experience was good, no different from a big-tech interview, and his English was good too. The call software had a built-in coding pad. I nailed it with a trie, ran it to test it, no problems. I don't think they have a fixed question bank fo…

No responseOnsite0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

LRU Cache with a TTL Twist, Passed With Unfinished Code

TikTok engineer position, first round (technical screen). A variant of the classic LRU Cache problem (LeetCode 146). First the interviewer introduced themselves, then asked me to introduce myself. Then the interviewer asked: why are you looking to switch jobs, and why TikTok. Then it was on to coding — the classic LRU Cache problem, but with an extra requirement: support for TTL. Specifically, TT…

In progressTechnical Screen0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
Apr 2026

Content Moderation Design With an ML Infra Twist

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BytedanceMachine Learning Engineer
Mar 2026

XGBoost, DP, and a Fraud-Detection System Design That Didn't Land

Interview time: February this year. Department: e-commercial team. Round 1: Self-introduction, walked through my projects. A few classic ML Q&A: Q: Why is XGBoost less prone to overfitting than a single decision tree? A: Because it's a gradient-boosting ensemble method (many weak-learner trees), it adds regularization (L1/L2, tree complexity penalties), a learning rate (shrinkage), row/column sub…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
BytedanceData ScientistIntern
Mar 2026

Round Two's Same-Day-Duplicate SQL Question

This is my write-up for the second round of the TikTok DS interview (I also have a write-up for the first round, but I won't link it here). The interviewer gave a brief self-introduction. Then I introduced myself and walked through my resume. They dug into things like how I did data preprocessing, how I handled the bias/variance tradeoff, and how I chose performance metrics, and then briefly dug…

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BytedanceData ScientistNew Grad
Mar 2026

Four HackerRank OA Questions, Cleared in One Pass

TikTok (ByteDance) 2026 new-grad OA on HackerRank, four questions, cleared all of them in one pass. Q1: Given a string, ignoring case, count how many positions have s[i] != s[i+1]. Just walk through it once. Q2: Simulate addition — for each digit, add the digit's contribution directly into the answer. Straightforward simulation, that's all it takes. Q3: Given a 0/1 array, you need to support two…

Online Assessment0
BytedanceSite Reliability Engineer
Feb 2026

A TinyURL Question With No Hints

We spent the first half hour going through my resume — work experience and projects. It was the kind of technical background conversation that doesn't have a standard answer: why I got promoted at my current company, what key projects I worked on, how I determined that the database system I was responsible for was stable, what tools I'd written before, that kind of thing. For the last 25 minutes…

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What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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