I applied online. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Bloomberg (London, England) in Apr 2018
Interview
The process was not smooth at all, but overall was decent.
I started by classic application on careers website. After 4 days I received an email to schedule a technical phone interview. They had to reschedule it other time due to reasons not known by me. So I rescheduled it after one week.
The interview lasted about one hour. First we discussed about my projects and got really deep into details. After that two problems.
1) Print the top 10 largest elements from integer array. Follow up to top K.
2) Given a string, rearrange it in decreasing order by the characters frequency and in lexicographical order if their frequency is equal.
After one month they invited me to an on-campus interview.
Lasted also about one hour. Again asked me about my projects and my previous work experience. Also 2 problems:
1) Given a large string (a book) and a list of words (unique words), print all occurences where all the words appear consecutively in the string. (the order does not matter, but need to be all from the list and having no other words between them).
Example:
INPUT:
string: "This is a test is. other a"
list: ["is", "a", "test"]
OUTPUT:
1,2
2) Consider the browser search where you type an URL. You need to keep track of the history and to print the most recent URLs the user searched. More or less LRU cache. Also discussed the trade-offs and time/space complexity.
After two months, they invited me to London office for the onsite.
Had only one techincal interview and one HR.
The techincal interview lasted about two hours (maybe more than 2...) and we discussed a lot about my projects and work experience and got into details. The interviewer seemed to be impressed about my work so there was just like a conversation. After that he gave me a design question about building a Custom Index Engine.
Came up really fast with a working solution but he wanted me to optimize as much as I could. So I told him where are the bottle necks and even got to multithreaded arhitecture.
This was my favorite interview and I enjoyed it very much. After that I had a HR interview where we discussed what I would like to work on, my previous work, what keeps me motivated, what I would improve, how and classic why bloomberg.
After two weeks, they called me and made me an offer for a Full Time Graduate position in London Office.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Print the top 10 largest elements from integer array. Follow up to top K
Given a large string (a book) and a list of words (unique words), print all occurences where all the words appear consecutively in the string. (the order does not matter, but need to be all from the list and having no other words between them).
Example:
INPUT:
string: "This is a test is. other a"
list: ["is", "a", "test"]
OUTPUT:
1,2
Consider the browser search where you type an URL. You need to keep track of the history and to print the most recent URLs the user searched. More or less LRU cache.
I was reached out by the recruiter directly through LinkedIn. I was asked one medium and one hard LeetCode-style question, with a few follow-ups. It started with a general introduction.
5 rounds they are all bloomberg tagged question i didn’t pass em round went deep in tour resume another leetcode question and q&a at the end. In retrospect, i thought I did well but maybe their bar this year is high.
5 rounds 3 tech 1 hr 1 em - they asked a couple leetcode mediums and I know others have gotten some hards I think you should prep the leetcode tagged they are asked a lot