TikTok’s interview process moves pretty quickly — usually, you can finish everything within two weeks. This is great for international students who are actively looking for internships or full-time jobs. The process generally has three stages: an online assessment (OA), technical interviews, and a final system design or behavioral interview. I applied for a backend developer role, so here’s a bit about what I went through and some tips.
First up was the OA. The questions were mostly medium-level LeetCode-style problems, involving data structures such as hash tables, two pointers, heaps, and union-find, as well as algorithms like sliding window, prefix sums, and DFS/BFS. I recommend practicing these beforehand, especially focusing on optimizing time complexity. Speed and accuracy matter here — if you can’t finish on time or make too many mistakes, it’s easy to get filtered out. For example, one question I got was about finding the shortest path, which needed both BFS and a priority queue. If you haven’t practiced something like that, it can be tricky.
After passing the OA, I had 1 or 2 technical interviews on Zoom. The interviewer shared a document and expected me to solve problems live, explaining my thought process as I went. They were very concerned about writing clean code and handling edge cases. During the coding, they kept asking why I chose a certain approach, if there was a better way, and even asked me to improve space complexity after I finished. So, it’s not just about algorithms, but also about communication and clear thinking.
The last round was either system design or a more general interview. I was asked to design the backend of a short video recommendation system, thinking through data flow, APIs, caching, and database design. Even though it was an entry-level position, TikTok expects candidates to show some solid systems thinking and engineering skills. For international students with no work experience, I’d suggest preparing a few system design templates in advance — like user systems, message queues, or content delivery systems — so you can adapt them during the interview.
Overall, TikTok’s interviews are somewhat challenging but fair, and the process is pretty efficient. The types of questions don’t change much. My advice: prepare early, stay calm, and focus on communicating clearly. If your fundamentals are solid and you’re confident, there’s a good chance you’ll get an offer.
Release time:2025-05-29
