Recently rejected from Bloomberg after going through all four rounds at the virtual onsite, absolutely gutted. Leading up to the interview I scoured forums on Leetcode/Reddit/Glassdoor to gather as much info as I could so I'd like to share my own experience as well for future interviewees.

Applied on the Bloomberg Careers website, after a couple of weeks I got an email to schedule a phone interview.

Phone Interview

• Interviewer was very friendly, talked about my experience and resume and stuff then did one technical question on Hackerrank
• Question was very similar to Reconstruct Itinerary
• Gave a DFS approach, interviewer sounded happy
• Had time to ask questions about Bloomberg for 15 min or so

Exactly 2 weeks later I got an email to schedule the virtual onsite. Had to schedule it for 2 months out, Bloomberg has been interviewing a ton of candidates.

Virtual Onsite
Round 1

• Hopped in a video interview with two engineers
• Both were super friendly and made me feel very relaxed
• Got asked Populating Next Right Pointers
• Gave a recursive approach, they had some follow ups and seemed happy with my answer
• Then got asked Design Underground System
• Did the two hashmap approach with the string concatention idea for the destination/times hashmap, interviewers liked the answer.

Round 2

• Next round with two new interviewers
• Got asked All Paths From Source to Target
• Walked through a DFS approach and coded it, interviewer seemed satisfied
• Next I got asked a more OO design question rather than an actual coding question
• They asked me to desing a class structure that allows developers to have a watchlist of stocks with specific custom constraints that could be anything they wanted. They wanted to talk about things like abstraction and such. Struggled a little bit until I realized I was overthinking it and went on to talk about using an interface. Interviwwer seemed happy, but it definitely wasn't perfect.

At this point I was told to stay on the call and someone from HR would come talk to me. I was hype, I was so happy to make it past the first two rounds and get the final two. For those that don't know, if you don't pass these first two, it's an automatic reject.

Round 3

• HR Round
• HR person came in to the call, super friendly, went over some HR stuff like any current offers/salary expectations/etc
• Basic behavioral questions like Why Bloomberg? Why did you become a software engineer?
• Lasted about 45 min or so then they said they would like to schedule a final round with an Engineering Manager

My recruiter reached out to me the same day and I scheduled the final round for a couple days out

Round 4

• Final round with engineering manager, lasted about an hour
• Asked me some behavioral questions like What is your dream job? Why Bloomberg?
• Went over my resume and asked me to talk about my favorite project. Went pretty in depth into that and asked me to explain my process throughout it. By no means was it perfect but I felt like I held my own
• Then he asked me a very open ended design question. It wasn't system design, it seems like they don't ask new grads that. It was more of a problem solving question to see what data structures I would use
• Then had plenty of time for me to ask them questions
• We talked for a while about Bloomberg, finance and a lot of interesting stuff

Recieved a rejection email about 2 weeks later.

Overall it was a good experience. All the interviewers were great and I learned a lot more about the company. I know I did really well on the technical rounds, but I guess my manager round didn't go well enough.

My advice for people: Definitely get Leetcode premium, the frequency list, at least for Bloomberg, was very accurate. Communication is very important, at no point in any interview was I asked to compile my code. Before you start coding anything at all, walk through your approach with the interviewers and even whiteboard it virtually if you can until they understand what you're going for.

Good luck!