I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at TikTok (Los Angeles, CA) in Jun 2021
Interview
Applied for sre role and the recruiter reached out to me the next day asking for availability.
Scheduled 2 interviews for 1 hour each.
Interviewer was calm and patient. Had a nice discussion.
About myself and role
architecture / work flow overview
Memorable prod incident - How did you handle
Linux & Networking Commands
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
compress and decompress string in python
ex: aaabbbbccc - output it as a3b4c3 and decompress it
Coding interviewer hit me with "what technical work have you done?" questions that I wasn't expecting since I was focused on coding. Coding was Leetcode. Similar to most tech companies, they want to see how you think. Unfortunately they did not warn me that speaking Mandarin was a "nice to have" skill.
I applied through university. I interviewed at TikTok (Singapore) in Jan 2026
Interview
Technical Interview
1. Leetcode
2. Past experience
3. CS Trivia
And then just talked about CS stuff in general. The interview is conducted in Chinese as well, and I believe for many of the roles it is expected that you can speak a communicable amount of chinese
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What did you do in your past job?
Follow up details on my past job
Interview for New Grad SRE position
first: HR reachout on LinkedIn
Second & Third: 2 rounds tech interviews - leetcode & system design
p.s.: Interviewers are suprer nice
Result: Rejected
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
introduce yourself and leetcode question (medium) with a follow-up
system design
