TikTok Machine Learning Engineer interview experience

In the first two, I had live coding where the focus went beyond just getting to a working answer—I had to explain my thinking and then handle deep dives into my previous projects.

The second technical round went the furthest. I got questioned about almost every decision choice I’d made in past work from an MLE perspective, and it felt like I was being asked to defend the reasoning end to end. The final technical conversation was with a team manager.

I remember leaving those rounds feeling like the bar was high because they weren’t satisfied with surface-level descriptions. I didn’t receive