Interview Experiences

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

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40 stories

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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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OnsiteXP0
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…

Technical Screen0
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…

Technical Screen0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Merge Intervals, Then Course Schedule

The interviewer was looking over my resume while I gave my self-introduction, and after I finished he asked about a project from my background — a project building a model, and he asked about offline evaluation for the model. Coding: given a set of time-window intervals, merge all overlapping intervals. Input: [[1,3],[2,6],[8,10]], output: [[1,6],[8,10]]. My approach: first sort by each interval'…

Technical Screen0
BytedanceSoftware Engineer
Jan 2026

Passed Round 1, Failed Round 2 After Solving Two of Three Problems

Round 1 was a coding round with the interviewer, and the experience was great. It was conducted in English, one hour total: the first five minutes were quick self-introductions, then 45 minutes of coding, and the last 10 minutes were for me to ask questions. The problem was a LeetCode question — the exact name was obscured in the original post, but it involved some kind of transformation. I walke…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
BytedanceSite Reliability Engineer
Jan 2026

Rejected After a Deep-Dive Linux Round

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RejectedTechnical ScreenXP0
ByteDanceResearch ScientistIntern
Jan 2026

A 10-Question CodeSignal OA Covering Bagging and K-Means from Scratch

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In progressOnline AssessmentXP0
BytedanceData Scientist
Jan 2026

Three Onsite Rounds on Multimodal Deployment and Dropout

Round 1 Discussed how to deploy a multimodal model when compute and GPU memory are limited. Follow-up: given existing captions and embeddings, how to speed up video retrieval. Asked what overfitting is and how to mitigate it. Coding question: implement a MinStack that returns the minimum in O(1) time. Round 2 Discussed methods to mitigate overfitting in deep learning and how Dropout works. Compar…

Onsite0
ByteDanceIntern
Jan 2026

Two Research-Focused Rounds, Then an Offer

First time sharing. Calling it an "interview report" is generous — it's more just my interview experience. Background: USNews Top 20 AI PhD, 3rd year, working on agent optimization and agentic RL. My publication record is pretty average, nothing that stands out — 2 ACL + 2 KDD + 1 EACL. I interned at Amazon before this. 03.17 Volcano Ark, AML Enterprise - RS team, HR call. Confirmed I could start…

OfferTechnical Screen0
ByteDanceMachine Learning Engineer
Jan 2026

Interviewer Late Both Rounds, Then Rejected

I interviewed with ByteDance's Compliance Team (based in Singapore), for an MLE position. Overall the interview experience was pretty bad. Let me start with the process: Round one: the interviewer was 5 minutes late, then spent about 40 minutes asking about my project in a lot of detail. The coding question was Maximum Product Subarray, which I solved right away. Round two: the interviewer was 15…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
BytedanceData EngineerNew Grad
Jan 2026

DP Problem on Video Selection with an Attention-Span Constraint

The earlier round 1 also went pretty smoothly, and they notified me about round 2 the next day. This round also wrapped up successfully. The interviewer, after the self-introduction, went straight into a behavioral round — mainly grilling me on my resume: briefly talk about your internship project, what you learned from it, what the most challenging project was, how communication worked within th…

In progressTechnical Screen0
ByteDanceData Scientist
Oct 2025

Friendlier Than Expected, Then the Headcount Moved

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In progressTechnical ScreenXP0
BytedanceProduct Manager
Apr 2025

TikTok Ecosystem Questions, Rejected Two Days Later

The first step was a take-home assignment with three questions: one about TikTok's ecosystem, and two more that were kind of behavioral-style. About a week after I submitted it, they scheduled an interview with me. They didn't say how many rounds there would be. I was originally scheduled with a director, but then got rescheduled to a team lead instead. The interview was entirely in English, and…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
BytedanceProduct Manager
Jan 2025

Phone Screen and a Tough Senior PM Case Round

These are some interview questions from memory. If there's a follow-up I'll keep updating this. Phone Screening (~15 minutes) Self-introduction Asked how my experience matched the role Asked about my willingness to relocate Asked about salary My turn to ask questions Business Round 1 - Senior PM (~40 minutes) Self-introduction Asked what I did at Company A Dug deep into the projects I worked on a…

RejectedOnsite0
ByteDanceProduct Manager
Oct 2024

Passed Every Round Within 3 Hours, Skip-Level Manager Round Next

New here, sharing my fresh interview experience from the last few days. Gotta say, ByteDance's efficiency is really something — for every round, I got notified I passed just 3 hours after the interview ended. Want to ask everyone on the forum: what should I watch out for in the +2 skip-level manager interview? Product Manager round (very short, ~15 min questions) Self-introduction My most success…

In progressTechnical Screen0

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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