Bloomberg SWE Interview Experience 2024

5 min readFeb 20, 2024

Hello, dear readers! I’m Sanika Inamdar, a final-year student majoring in Computer Engineering at the Pune Institute of Computer Technology. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview at Bloomberg for the Software Engineer position for the Pune office. Here’s sharing my experience.

How did I land the opportunity?

I was contacted by a Bloomberg recruiter on LinkedIn and was given the link to apply on the careers portal of Bloomberg for the role mentioned. She also suggested I add her name to the referral source while applying so that my application status could be updated promptly.

Generally, Bloomberg conducts 4 rounds namely, 2 technical rounds, 1 System Design round, and the final managerial round with the recruiter and engineering manager.

Round 1 (Technical DSA):

Online mode on Zoom and Hackerrank code pair
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 1 hr

So initially the interviewer started the call by introducing herself and her role at Bloomberg London. She then proceeded to my profile and asked about my internship experiences and projects. She was curious about one of the projects I mentioned and asked few more technical details about the same. This lasted for about 15 minutes.

The interviewer then asked me to join the Hackerrank code pair to proceed with the problem-solving question. The question that was asked was pretty similar to Leetcode’s Design an Underground System question. But one of the key aspects to note here is that there was neither a code template provided beforehand nor any function definitions. The candidate was expected to determine the class’s member functions and data members required for it according to the question’s expectations.

Before proceeding to code, I explained my approach to the interviewer completely and she was well-satisfied with the solution. I was able to code the question optimally within 20–25 minutes without hints and 1–2 clarifying questions. She was pleased with the code as well yet we discussed in detail the time and space complexity of every function of the class. She asked for the reasons behind using all the data structures to solve this problem and if there was any other better option or not. Finally, I was asked if I had any questions from my side, and after some interesting discussion on those questions, the interview ended.

Overall this round went pretty well and the interviewer also hinted to me to check for email updates for the upcoming round.

Round 2 (Technical DSA):

Online mode on Zoom and Hackerrank code pair
Difficulty: Medium
Time: 1 hr

This time the interviewer was from the Bloomberg Pune office. The interview began with him introducing himself, his work, and the team. Following this, I was asked to introduce myself and explain briefly about my professional internship experiences. The interviewer was keenly interested in knowing about the details of the internship project at one of the companies I worked for. He also asked me to explain the role I played in implementing the technical tasks of the project.

Further, I was questioned thoroughly on concepts of data structures and algorithms and object-oriented programming. The questions were based on the following topics,

All OOP principles with examples
Linked list and its internal working
Hashmaps, their types, and internal implementation
Collision handling in hashing
Some memory allocation-related questions.

All of this lasted for nearly 25 minutes and further, we proceeded to the problem-solving question on the Hackerrank code pair. The question was based on graphs similar to the Leetcode’s Number of Islands question. Since there were only about 30–35 minutes left, he asked me if I was comfortable coding the question in the remaining time apart from discussing the solution and the approach. I said yes and we advanced on discussing the solution and the approach and ultimately coding the question. Similar to the previous round, no template was provided, and I had to write the code from scratch. The time and space complexity of the solution was questioned in detail and the interviewer also asked me to run the code this time.

Unfortunately, I was facing a syntax error that I could not resolve in the given time frame. Yet, the interviewer was satisfied and content with my approach, the data structures used, and the code. He asked me any questions from my side to which I expressed my interest in 2 of Bloomberg’s newly released features or software. This was again an insightful talk for the next few minutes that resulted in him suggesting to read one of Bloomberg’s blogs for my knowledge and then ultimately finishing the interview.

Round 3 (System Design):

A few days later, I received a mail similar to the mail after previous rounds from the recruiter stating that my feedback was positive and they would like to move to the next round (round 3). I was also asked to share my availability, as before, within the dates mentioned in the mail.

Unfortunately, just a week before my scheduled interview in January 2024, I received a call from the recruiter informing me that the positions for the role had been filled, and they were no longer hiring for it. Hence they had to cancel my scheduled interview, and my application was no longer being considered :(

Though it was an unlucky incident, I learned and realized quite a few things about Bloomberg’s hiring or in general about SWE hiring from my experience as well as from experiences I read and heard.

Here’s sharing a few things I learned.

Archives of interview questions play a very important role in the preparation strategy for any company like Bloomberg. Gathering and organizing previously asked questions and resources helps in targeted practice, focusing on the most likely questions to be asked.
Therefore I would suggest finding them on GitHub leetcode company tagged questions, leetcode discuss, geeksforgeeks, etc, and observing the pattern of questions being asked. I have shared such links at the end of the article.
‘Design’ tagged questions on leetcode are one of the most common questions. Bloomberg focuses more on how a candidate can choose the best data structures for a particular problem and hence their problems involve using multiple ones for solving like sets, maps, linked lists, queues, etc according to my observation. It is also suggested to code optimally during interviews.
Asking unique questions related to the company’s features, blogs, software, or products demonstrates research and genuine interest in the organization. This may help in covering up for the times you may not have answered a few questions confidently in the interview.
Most importantly, it is better if you keep early follow-ups with your recruiter to get to know the application status and the feedback of the previous interview as well as schedule your interviews as soon as possible. This reduces the gaps between successive interviews and therefore increases the possibility of hiring you for the role if you reach and clear the final round.

Some Resources I referred to:

Thanks a lot for taking out time to read my experience! I hope it helps :)