TikTok interview notes, page 2 of 28

“Broad enough that I fumbled the opening.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I went straight to the obvious stuff, phone connectivity, a TikTok integration for laundry tips, whatever.” The rest of the author's notes on Product Manager interview at TikTok, Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I went straight to 'check if the data is clean' which felt safe but probably wasn't the most impressive opener.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“Knew this was coming eventually but still fumbled the attention mechanism explanation a bit.” The rest of the author's notes on Machine Learning Engineer interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I knew this problem but still fumbled the opening.” The rest of the author's notes on Machine Learning Engineer interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“The query was doing COUNT(DISTINCT e.user_id) grouped by u.user_id which gives you either 0 or 1 per user, not a site-wide DAU count at all.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I went straight to entropy as my first metric, which felt smart in the moment but I didn't frame the business case well before jumping in.” The rest of the author's notes on Data Scientist interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This one sprawled in every direction the second I started answering.” The rest of the author's notes on Data Scientist interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“This is the kind of question that sounds manageable until you realize how much ground it covers.” The rest of the author's notes on Data Scientist interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“Started with the DP approach where dp[i] is the LIS ending at index i, which is fine, but they immediately asked if I could do better.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at TikTok, Technical Phone Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.