TikTok Machine Learning Engineer interview experience

The first round was with a direct mentor, the second with a direct team lead, and the third with the hiring manager. The interviews were conducted in Chinese overall, with the last one switching to English since it was tied to an overseas interviewer.

Across the rounds, I spent most of the time working through technical discussion rather than speed-running lots of unrelated topics. The challenging part wasn’t just the questions themselves, it was matching each interviewer’s expectations—mentor-style depth up front, then a team-lead perspective, and finally how the hiring manager thought