YoE: 1
Position: Software Engineer at Bloomberg
Location: New York, New York
Date: August-September 2021

Introduction

This is the third time I've applied to Bloomberg. The first time I applied for an internship as a junior in college and didn't receive a response. The second time I applied for a full-time role as a senior in college and bombed the phone interview. Because of these failures I was determined to make it into Bloomberg.

Preparation

I have one year of experience as a software engineer at a Fortune 500 company.

I've been grinding leetcode for almost a year and have solved hundreds of problems. Easy/Medium/Hard split is 55/40/5. I interviewed elsewhere before Bloomberg, which helped me get used to the interview setting and practicing my behavioral questions.

Application

I applied at the end of June and heard back several weeks later to schedule a phone interview in the middle of August.

Phone Screen

The phone screen was very simple but the quality was poor as it was a phone call instead of Zoom/Google Hangouts and my interviewer had an accent that was difficult to understand.

The question had to do with traversing a tree from left to right. So if the tree looks like this:

		1
	  /   \
	 2     3
   /   \     \ 
  4     5     6
 

The output should be 4,2,1,5,3,6.

At first I compared this to inorder traversal and then worked my way to the solution from there. It involves using extra space to keep track of a node's column. I used some Python features the interviewer wasn't aware of, but did my best to explain them. The interviewer seemed pleased with my solution and asked a followup or two. I asked some questions and we ended a bit early.

Onsite

I heard back a few days later and scheduled the onsite.

Round 1 - Technical

This round started off with a short behavioral discussion and then had two questions. Design Underground System and Two City Scheduling. I had seen both of these and they were simple to solve. I asked the interviewer some more questions before ending the interview.

Round 2 - Technical

Like the last round, this round had a short behavioral component before covering the same problem discussed in the phone screen. We went a bit more in depth than in the phone screen and many follow ups were asked regarding time/space complexity, tradeoffs, alternative approaches, etc. This took up most of the interview time. The next question was Valid Triangle Number which I hadn't seen before but I was able to explain the brute force approach. I asked the interviewer a question or two before we ended the interview.

Round 3 - HR

Since I passed the technical rounds the HR round was the next step. The HR representative was very friendly and asked some common behavioral questions you'd see at any company as well as some questions gauging my interest in Bloomberg specifically. This should be very easy if you've done your research on the company.

Because of COVID, Bloomberg is splitting up the onsite into multiple parts. I was told the recruiter would reach out to me to schedule the final round with the engineering manager. This interview happened the following week.

Round 4 - Engineering Manager

This was a very basic interview -- similar to the HR round but digging more into technical details of my work and design decisions. If you've prepared for Amazon's 14 LP's and have some stories prepared this should be a piece of cake. I had plenty of follow up questions about Bloomberg prepared in order to demonstrate interest in the role and the company.

Result

I heard back after 1.5 weeks with the results. Typically Bloomberg will only call you if you have an offer and will email if it's a rejection.

I have uploaded my offer details to levels.fyi, and the numbers there seem to be accurate.

Advice

Bloomberg mainly asks easy/mediums at the entry level, so just prepare a ton of these and you should be fine. If you're unlucky you might get a hard but I wouldn't count on it.

It is equally important, if not more important to communicate and explain your solution well as it is to actually get the correct solution. Practice doing leetcode problems while talking out loud about your thought process. I tend to talk to myself as I'm coding anyway so this came naturally to me. Leetcode's mock interview function came in handy for doing this under time pressure.

The Bloomberg tagged questions seem to be representative of the actual questions in the interview.

Also research Bloomberg and be able to explain why you want to work at Bloomberg specifically -- cultural fit is just as important as technical performance.

Also understand that Bloomberg interviews seem to be very luck based. I've read about people interviewing and getting rejected even though they solved a question perfectly. I was lucky to have good interviewers who I got along with and could understand (as well as having a duplicate question in my phone screen and onsite). If you feel that you didn't do well don't lose hope and apply again. I believe the cooldown period is six months but I could be wrong. Good luck!