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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - United States

May 1, 2025
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Worst interview process I've experienced. The technical screening interview was fairly normal, involving a project deep dive and a medium coding question.

For the next round, two additional technical interviews were scheduled. For the first interview (which they rescheduled at the last minute to 9 PM local time), the interviewer was late and started the call in Chinese. I am not fluent and never claimed to be, and this interview was for a US office.

I asked for the interview to be in English, but it was clear the interviewer was not prepared for an English interview, nor prepared in general.

There was a significant language barrier, which especially impeded my project discussion. This was most evident when the interviewer pasted the coding question in Chinese and had to spend extra time verbally translating it into English. They also asked me to draw system diagrams, but no whiteboard tool was provided. The interviewer did not drive the discussion well and drilled into project details, leaving an unreasonably short 10 minutes for the hard-level coding question. It seemed I was doomed to fail for not being fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

After the first interview, I still showed up for the second scheduled interview, but that interviewer was a no-show. The recruiting team ghosted me, did not respond to reschedule the interview, and sent a generic rejection email a few days later with no explanation.

Super unprofessional behavior across the board. It's bad enough that I am considering filing an EEOC complaint, as there was clear favoritism for Chinese candidates.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 23 interview experiences for the TikTok Senior Software Engineer role in United States.

Success Rate

9%
Pass Rate

TikTok's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in the United States is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive13%
Neutral35%
Negative52%

Candidates reported having very negative feelings for TikTok's Senior Software Engineer interview process in United States.

TikTok Work Experiences