TikTok interview notes, page 3 of 28

“I went straight to conversion rate and GMV which felt safe but I could tell they wanted me to go deeper.” 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.

“The base case (remove one element) is manageable once you realize that removing an index shifts the parity of everything after it, so you can precompute prefix sums for even and odd positions and check the balance in O(n).” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at TikTok, Onsite - Coding / Algorithms round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“Pretty open-ended and I rambled a bit at first.” 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.

“Way broader than I expected.” The rest of the author's notes on Machine Learning Engineer interview at TikTok, Onsite - System Design / Architecture 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 algorithm and content relevance angle because that felt safest, but looking back I spread myself too thin.” The rest of the author's notes on Data Scientist 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.

“Took me a minute to see this was a DP on subsequences with a pairwise transition constraint.” 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 took forever and I wasn't prepared for how deep they wanted to go on every single job.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at TikTok, Hiring Manager Screen round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.

“I knew the formula for SE but fumbled a bit explaining why we use the sample proportion in it rather than the null value.” 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.

“I started with the obvious stuff, L1 vs L2, and the interviewer just nodded and waited.” 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.

“This one took me longer than I expected to get into.” 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.