TikTok Backend Intern Interview

AI Hater — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 05:59:30 +0000

Hey guys, how's your internship season going?

Mine? Not too promising. But I still have something to tell.

This year, I got my first internship interview ever, and honestly, I didn't expect it to come from a company as big as TikTok.

I sent out quite a few applications and only got two replies. One of them I don't really count, but the other one was TikTok.

I didn't get the offer in the end, but I thought I'd share my experience anyway. Hopefully, it can help someone who's currently going through the TikTok interview process - or at least someone who's interested in applying.

I had two interviews with TikTok, both for a Backend Developer Intern role. One was for the LIVE team, and the other was with Data Trust & Safety, although both interviews had a strong focus on LIVE.

Some Q&As

1. Did LeetCode actually help?

Yes. Absolutely. Totally. 100%.

From my experience, TikTok's coding questions are quite similar to the usual LeetCode format. This is slightly different from some other companies, where the coding question might be modified to fit the team's specific work, which can sometimes make the problem harder to recognise, especially for the young candidates.

TikTok's coding questions can range from medium-hard to hard. However, I only got one coding question across my two interviews, and it was around medium difficulty.

I actually got the general approach pretty quickly after reading the problem. However, the problem itself wasn't clear enough that I only realized when I missed an edge case. I had to clarify it with the interviewer, and unfortunately, I didn't have enough time left to fix everything.

My personal tip: If your interview is only a week away, use your AI agent to generate coding questions based on the job description.

Not just for TikTok, but for pretty much any company.

Companies often choose problems that are somewhat related to the type of work their team is doing. So instead of randomly grinding hundreds of LeetCode questions, you can use the JD to narrow down what you should practise.

I tried this myself, and it actually worked pretty well.

Of course, I can't guarantee that you'll get the exact same type of question. But if you only have one week to prepare, I think it's a pretty useful shortcut.

2. What was the interview structure?

The email said it would be a technical interview with an opportunity to explain your work.

So naturally, I thought: "Okay, probably just some coding."

NOPE!!!

TikTok is really the trendsetter of

"Don't let anyone guess your next move."

The first interview

My first interview covered:

Introduction
Project deep dive
CS fundamentals
Behavioural questions
System design
Coding

And all of that happened within 55 minutes, with the last five minutes reserved for my questions.

Now you can probably understand why I didn't have enough time to fix my last coding edge case 💀

Everything moved incredibly fast.

The positive side? I barely had time to feel nervous.

The second interview

The second interview was quite different.

It was only around 35 minutes, and there was:

Introduction
Project deep dive
CS fundamentals
A little system design connected to my project

There was no coding question.

Honestly, I enjoyed the second interview much more.

It felt more like a proper technical conversation where the interviewer was trying to understand how deeply I actually understood what I had built, rather than checking whether I could answer a bunch of different questions in a short amount of time.

And yes, the project discussion was VERY deep.

3. Does TikTok prioritise Chinese speakers?

Honestly, I have no idea.

What I do know is that after reading hundreds of TikTok interview reviews, I noticed that the interviewers were very often Chinese.

In my second interview, one of the first questions I was asked when the interviewer joined the call was:

“Mandarin or English?”

That honestly confused me a little.

I don't speak Chinese, but the interviewer's English was very good, and we still had a really good technical discussion. Personally, I don't think not speaking Chinese had anything to do with my rejection.

I've also seen people mention having communication difficulties with some TikTok interviewers. But realistically, that's not something we can control.

Just focus on what you can control: your technical knowledge, your projects, your communication, and your preparation.

My personal thoughts and experience with TikTok's Backend Interview

1. Practise LeetCode — seriously.

This is basically non-negotiable.

But don't just practise randomly. Practise with a timer.

For my first interview, I had roughly 15 minutes from reading the problem, understanding it, discussing the approach, building test cases, and submitting the solution.

That's not a lot of time.

So when you practise, don't just ask:

"Can I solve this problem?"

Also ask:

"Can I solve and explain this problem under interview pressure?"

There's a big difference.

Also, if you interview for a developer role, I would recommend you to discuss the performance scaling and system design with your agent after each question. We all know interviewers love to make things difficult for the candidates. And besides, you will learn so many, trust me.

And if you don't have much time before the interview, I'd rather practise 10 relevant problems properly than blindly grind 100 random ones.

2. Know your projects inside out

This one is probably even more important than I expected.

If you put a project on your resume, be prepared to defend every single thing you wrote about it.

And I don't just mean:

"What technologies did you use?"

You should also be ready for questions like:

Why did you choose this architecture?
What happens when multiple requests arrive at the same time?
How does your system handle concurrency?
What happens when the traffic increases?
Where could the bottleneck be?
How would you scale it?
What happens if a service fails?
How much load can your system handle?
What would you change if you had to deploy this in production?

Basically, if you built it, understand why it works—not just how to make it work.

3. Don't underestimate your university subjects

I definitely did.

The CS fundamentals questions actually came from things I had studied at university.

The funny part?

I remember being asked something that I had literally studied two or three months before the interview.

And somehow, when the interviewer asked me about it, my brain decided:

"Sorry, this information is no longer available."

So yeah.

Don't completely ignore your uni subjects just because they don't feel immediately useful.

Data structures, algorithms, operating systems, databases, networking, AI, etc. can absolutely come back during an interview.

4. There are (at least) two types of interviewers

This is obviously just my personal observation, but I felt like I experienced two very different interviewer styles.

Type 1: The prepared interviewer

They have a list of questions prepared beforehand and work through them.

If you get this type of interviewer, you might be slightly luckier because they tend to stick to their questions and don't necessarily go too far into follow-ups.

Type 2: The senior engineer

This one is scary.

They don't even need to look at the questions.

You introduce yourself.

You talk about your project.

And then they start asking questions based on literally everything you just said.

Your own words then become your death certificate.

So my advice is:

Don't lie. Don't exaggerate.

If you say you "designed the architecture", be prepared to explain the architecture.

If you say you "implemented a scalable backend", be prepared to explain why it's scalable.

If you say you "handled concurrency", be prepared to explain exactly how.

At the same time, don't undersell yourself either.

You should be confident about what you genuinely know. Yes, your interviewers are probably very good at what they do, and that can be intimidating. But confidence goes both ways, human instinct will let the interviewer naturally perceive you as someone who knows what they're talking about.

5. Write down your interview reflections

This is something I wish I'd started doing earlier.

After an interview, write down:

What questions were asked?
What did I answer well?
Where did I get stuck?
What did I forget?
What would I answer differently next time?
What technical topics do I need to review?

You'd be surprised how much you can improve just by recalling the interview while it's still fresh.

And if you're not particularly good at self-reflection or don't know how to organise it, just write down your raw thoughts and ask your AI agent to turn them into a reflection for a better upcoming interview.

I did this after my first interview.

Looking back, my first interview was honestly kind of a mess.

But my second one was way more organised, partly because I had already reflected on what went wrong the first time.

6. Read the interview reviews

Have a look at Glassdoor before your interview.

There are thousands of interview reviews there, and while you obviously shouldn't assume you'll get exactly the same questions, they can give you a pretty good idea of what the process looks like.

What I shared here is just one person's experience.

Your interview could be completely different.

7. Do mock interviews and practice your speaking

Yeah, again - if you don't have anyone to practise with, you can just do it with your AI agent.

Prompt it carefully, make it behave like a real interviewer, and be strict with the timing, especially for the coding section. Don't give yourself 30 minutes to solve a problem when you know you'll only get 15 minutes in the actual interview.

If you want to see the prompt I used (which was actually pretty useful), comment below and I'll send it to you.

Now, about speaking skills.

I would strongly recommend preparing stories around your projects so that whenever a project-related question comes up, you already know what you want to talk about.

The project discussion shouldn't be something completely unexpected. You know your own projects, you know what's on your resume, and you should be prepared to explain them. If you can't talk about your own work smoothly, there's a pretty high chance the interviewer will think you're not ready for the interview.

And... that's not good, you know that right? :(

Also, don't just read, write, and convince yourself that you know everything.

Speak. Out. Loud.

You'll quickly realise that what you think you understand in your head isn't always what comes out when you actually have to explain it.

You want to be able to answer questions clearly, simply, and as concisely as possible. And honestly, that takes practice.

One more thing: you can't really fake what you don't know when you're speaking.

Once you start explaining something out loud, the gaps in your knowledge become much more obvious. You'll notice where you hesitate, where your explanation gets messy, and where you actually don't understand something as well as you thought you did.

And that's exactly why speaking practice is so useful.

You find the weaknesses before the interviewer does.

Final thoughts

Honestly, I wasn't particularly surprised or sad when I got rejected.

I knew I hadn't prepared enough.

And that's probably the biggest thing I took away from this experience.

Getting rejected after my first-ever internship interview with a company like TikTok isn't really a bad result in my eyes. I got to experience what a real technical interview feels like, I know what I need to improve, and my second interview was already much better than my first.

Also, TikTok seems to be opening quite a lot of internship positions right now, so give it a shot.

You might think you're not ready.

Apply anyway.

You never know.

Anyway, that's it from me.