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

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. ##...

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:
3. 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)
4. 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)
5. 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)
6. 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:
2. If you want to use your Finance experience, why not go to XYZ company instead?
3. If you want international experience, why not apply to a tech company in the UK?
4. Why do you want to relocate to London?
5. I was just really honest in my answers.
6. He explained the team\'s role in the organization and how the team funcitons as a whole.
7. 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 :))