TikTok Software Engineer interview experience

I started with an HR-style outreach without an immediate coding component, then moved into technical interviews where the first half was basically a deep dive into my specific projects. In those conversations, the interviewers asked me to connect details from my work to the way I thought about problems.

After that, the coding portion showed up as LeetCode-style questions, usually medium-level, with the expectation that I could handle the core logic cleanly. One time I saw a standard island-counting style problem, and I remember the interviewer also asking whether I had questions for them