Preparing for an interview? Check out Cracking the Coding Interview
Published on

Bloomberg | London | Senior Software Engineer | October 2022 | Offer

Author
  • Shared Anonymously

Edu: B. Tech CSE from Tier 1.5 Indian college

Exp: 4 years

Position: Senior Software Engineer

Location: London, United Kingdom

Date: October 2022

Applied via careers site. Received a follow-up from recruiter within a week.

Screening

  1. A discussion on one of the projects mentioned in my resume - ~10 mins
  2. Why Bloomberg?
  3. Search in a sequence which is decreasing to a point and then increasing (U shaped) - similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/search-in-rotated-sorted-array/.

On-site 1 (Coding)

  1. A discussion on one of the projects mentioned in my resume - ~10 mins
  2. https://leetcode.com/problems/design-underground-system/
  3. https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/1504782/bloomberg-phone-interview-1042021-collatz-conjecture-rejection

On-site 2 (Coding)

  1. Discussion on my intern mentorship experience and one of the projects I drove
  2. Design an app store class which can insert, lookup, and delete apps to a registry in constant time - very similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/insert-delete-getrandom-o1/

On-site 3 (System Design with Team Lead)

  1. Deep discussion on one of the projects mentioned in my resume - ~20 mins
  2. Was shown a sample data pipeline which involved a parquet file ingestion job using a Kafka queue to write to an S3 storage. The interviewer then asked me questions like:
  • How to scale up this if we start receiving a million (small) files a day? (Increase the number of Kafka consumers i.e. scale horizontally)
  • What happens to the solution if instead of a million small files, we start receiving a few hundred really big files? (Consumers are wasted; we can get OOMs)
  • How can we make sure we don't run out of memory on a single node? (Shard files using something like Spark before handing them to the workers)
  • Identify single points of failures in the system.

On-site 4 (Recruiter)

Just a basic chat about work culture, London, recruiting efforts, etc. No questions.

On-site 5 (Hiring Manager)

  1. The HM was really keen on understading why I was wanting to join Bloomberg? He asked me questions, based on my background like:
  • If you want to use your Finance experience, why not go to XYZ company instead?
  • If you want international experience, why not apply to a tech company in the UK?
  • Why do you want to relocate to London?
  • I was just really honest in my answers.
  1. He explained the team's role in the organization and how the team funcitons as a whole.
  2. He asked me to come up with a high-level architecture of an alerts system for securities. I had prior experience with this stuff so was able to come up with a design quickly and was able to handle more complex requirements when asked.

A few points:

  • Even though I didn't know all the technologies (e.g. Spark), the interviewers seem to only care whether I could come up with conceptual solutions (e.g. sharding).
  • Everyone asked me "Why Bloomberg"?
  • Every round included at least something from my resume for significant portions of the interviews.
  • I would strongly suggest going through the "bloomberg" tagged interview experiences and interview questions on leetcode disuss. Really helps!

Final status: Offered (and accepted and joined :))

Report • Mark as Helpful