Status: New grad, IT Engineering, Mumbai
Position: Entry Level Software Engineer at Bloomberg London
Location: London

ROUND 1: Technical phone screen 1:1

1. I was asked general questions from my resume, which they already had a copy of.
2. Describe one project. WHat challenges did you face?
3. Algorithm questions:
   1) Design a class to store new stories, containing author, history, title, content.
   2) Write a method to sort the stories on the basis of history, i.e. latest news.
   3) Improve time complexity
   4) Fetch top 100 stories.
   5) I was asked time complexity and to optimise all problems that I solved. I used hashmaps for easy retrieval.
   6) The interviewer and I shared a hackerrank screen.

ROUND 2: Video Interview 1:1

1. Similar to phone interview
2. Tell me about yourself.
3. Algorithm questions:
   1) Given a set of intervals like ( [2,5], [3,8], [11,15], [14,18] ) Merge coinciding to form
   ([2.8], [11, 18])
   2) Standard Greedy based problem
   3) Standard Dynamic Programming problem

ROUND 3: Onsite round at London office.

1. My two way tickets and accomodation for one day was arranged for by them.

2. A tour of the office building was given. Architecture is really cool. Very unique concepts and designs.

3. All candidates met over breakfast with the group of interviewers, who would be taking our interviews for the day. It was an informal conversation mostly about introducing ourselves and getting comfortable

4. Technical round 1: 2:1
   1) Tell me about yourself/
   2) I was asked extensively about some of my projects.
   3) Given a list of netflix series and their episodes, find the episode that atleast 70% of the population that has finished watching the series has watched.
   For example:
   Episode no. Count
   1 - 40
   2 - 20
   ...
   .
   .
   .
   7 - 7
   .
   .
   10 - 10

   Answer: episode 7. Because 10 people have finished watching the entire series. 70% of 10 =7
   episode 7 has been watched by 7 users.
   4) Design the method and class for this functionality. User class and Series class. Which data structure would you use and why. etc
   5) Find the minimum number of insertions, deletions, swaps required to make one strinf an anagram of another.
   6) I was asked to do a quick dry run of the code I had written and also test a few test cases, corner cases.

5. After the first technical round, a few people were escorted out, while others were asked to wait for the next two rounds.
   6)HR Round: 1:1
   1) Why do you want to join bloomberg?
   2) Do you have any previous offers?
   3) Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
   4) Other general questions.
   5) This round is basically to understand if you would fit into the bloomberg culture and if you will accept the offer or not. (if given)

6. Technical Round 2:
   1) This one was with a senior manager.
   2) Asked me general questions from my resume.
   3) Why do you want to join bloomberg?
   4) Difference between Java and C++. Where would you use which one and why?
   5) How would you sort a list of stocks and fecth top 100 while new items are dynamicaly being added to the list.
   6) Questions about heap and binary search tree. How are hashmaps and sets etc implemented internally in c++.

Questions are standard data structure and algorithm based. Be sure about time complexity of whatever you implement and be ready to optimise your code upto O(1) (if possible). Optimisation was focused on at every stage in the interview. Preparing from Cracking the Coding Interview helps a lot. Questions in bloomberg interviews are often repeated. So read and solve all possible interview questions from past experiences.
Interviewers are very nice and help you along the way if you get stuck or anything. Explain your thought process and talk out loud so they can understand how you think. Clarify the question of something is not clear.
I was told I would hear back from them within a week. I had my first phone interview in December and the last onsite one in April. So don't worry if you dont hear back from them after the initial rounds. If they decide to not go further ahead with you, they let you know pretty quick.

The bloomberg office is very close to the london bridge and tower bridge. Accomodation was provided in a nearby hotel.