I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at TikTok in Mar 2025
Interview
First ask about my background, then knowledge about transformer and different between tranformer and rnn. Then, coding problems are write a cross entropy loss from scratch and a medium leetcode problem
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Briefly describe transformer, and describe the difference between transformer and RNN
First Round Leetcode 1d DP, Solved it using two methods. Answered how to build embedding function and what RAG structure to use. Still no pass. The interviewer's mic during the coding is making a lot of buzz noise and they will not turn it down. It is frustrating experience.
Approached by recruiter with whom I had an initial phone call. Then had a video technical interview. The procedure and logistics was all very smooth. I was asked about my background (with a couple of follow-up questions), then a couple of basic ML questions, then a coding question.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Bias variance trade-off, then leetcode style question