ByteDance Backend Engineer interview questions

14 Backend Engineers have shared notes from their ByteDance interviews, with the questions they were asked in each round. That is 5% of the 289 ByteDance interview notes on Screna AI.

14 Backend Engineer interview notes

ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Bytedance backend screen, pretty standard networking fundamentals territory. One question, quick session, nothing too wild.
  • Can you explain what TCP and UDP are and walk through the key differences between them?

“Knew this one cold so I rattled off connection-oriented vs connectionless, reliability guarantees, ordering, handshake overhead.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Bytedance backend round, one algorithmic problem the whole time. Pretty standard tree recursion territory but the edge cases tripped me up more than I expected.
  • Given two binary trees A and B, determine whether B is a substructure of A. B is a substructure if there exists a node in A where, starting from that node, every node in B matches the corresponding node in A by value and position. B does not need to reach the leaves of A, and a null B is never considered a substructure.

“My first instinct was to just check if B is a subtree, which is wrong.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Backend engineer interview at Bytedance that touched on prompt engineering, which I wasn't expecting to prep for at all. Not a ton of detail to share but the question itself was interesting enough to write up.
  • What techniques do you use when writing prompts? Specifically: how do you describe prompts when working with a coding agent, and how do you design prompt templates?

“They basically split the question into two parts themselves, which helped me not ramble.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Short Bytedance backend screen, basically just one question about LLM experience and that was it.
  • Which large language models have you worked with?

“Pretty surface-level opener.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Bytedance backend screen, just one question about OS fundamentals. Pretty short session, felt like a warmup but they seemed to care about the answer more than I expected.
  • What is the difference between a thread and a process?

“I knew this one but fumbled the memory model part.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Bytedance backend screen, just one database fundamentals question from what I can tell. Pretty standard stuff but worth writing down.
  • Can you explain what primary keys, foreign keys, and indexes are in a relational database?

“Covered the basics fine.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Bytedance backend round, one algorithmic question that looked simple on the surface but had a real gotcha in the space constraint. Managed to get through it but spent too long second-guessing myself on the operator precedence handling.
  • Given a string representing a valid arithmetic expression with non-negative integers and +, -, *, / operators separated by spaces (no parentheses), evaluate it and return the integer result. Integer division should truncate toward zero. Can you do it in O(n) time?

“My first instinct was stack, which works fine, but they pushed back asking if I could do it with O(1) space.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
ByteDance backend interview with a tree problem I'd actually bombed before at a previous ByteDance round. Felt weirdly poetic getting it again and finally cracking it.
  • Find the maximum width of a binary tree, where width is defined as the number of nodes between the leftmost and rightmost nodes at any given level (including null nodes in between).

“I had failed this exact problem at a previous ByteDance interview and somehow got it again here.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Bytedance for a backend engineering role, just the one question but they really sat with it.
  • Walk me through the most challenging project or piece of work you've tackled. What made it hard, what did you actually do about it, and what came of it?

“Classic question but I still fumbled the setup a bit.”

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ByteDance·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Bytedance backend engineer interview with a coding round. Just the one question from what I remember, pretty standard stuff.
  • Given a string containing various bracket types, determine whether the parentheses are valid and properly matched.

“Classic stack problem, got through it fine.”

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