Status: Student, MS CS at ASU
Location: Tempe, AZ

Technical phone screen (1 hour):

• 15-20 mins talking about my resume and why Bloomberg.
• Design transit system (https://leetcode.com/problems/design-underground-system/) and follow up questions, like, ways to store results, caching, etc.

Virtual OnSite (3 rounds):
Round 1 (1 hour):

• 15-20 mins talking about my resume and why Bloomberg.
• Given a binary tree, return a subtree which is a binary search tree and has the maximum sum of value stored at each node. A bit like https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-sum-bst-in-binary-tree/. This was a lengthy problem and I coded out an efficient solution, however, we did not have time for follow up questions.

Round 2 (1 hour):

• 15-20 mins talking about my resume and why Bloomberg.
• 1D candy crush, given a string s and a threshold k, remove similar consecutive characters with length greater than or equal to k.

Input: s: "baaabbbc", k: 3
Output: "c"
Explanation:
1. Remove 3 'a': "baaabbbc" => "bbbbc"
2. Remove 4 'b': "bbbbc" => "c"

Coded out an efficient solution using a stack.

• Currency Conversion problem, exactly the same as https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/483660/google-phone-currency-conversion. Coded out an efficient solution using DFS with follow up questions.

Round 3 (1 hour):
This one went straight into the problem, no discussions or questions over my resume.

• Design search autocomplete system (https://leetcode.com/problems/design-search-autocomplete-system/). This was also a lengthy code to figure out but I coded out a trie solution. I am not sure if that was the efficient solution or not. Again, we did not have time for follow up questions.

Behavioral Round (30 minutes):
A generic behavioral round with questions about values of Bloomberg and past experiences

Interview with Engineering Manager (1 hour):
This was an interesting interview, after going over my resume for 15-20 mins, the interviewer put me in a hypothetical scenario of developing, testing and debugging an application which uploads files from a folder to a remote location using FTP. The interview was mostly about low level technical choices, like, if the application is failing how would I go about debugging the failures, where do start the investigation, how to fix various issues like issues with the code, issues with the FTP module, etc.

I got a rejection mail a week from the final interview. I tried reaching out to the recruiter about some feedback but I got a "Its not our policy to share feedbacks, you can apply again in a year" sort of a generic reply. I honestly cannot tell where I went wrong, I solved all the questions and I think, apart from that final technical interview, all my solutions were efficient solutions as well. All in all, this was a tough pill to swallow but, oh well.