Bloomberg Software Engineer Interview Experience — Phone Screen, Super Day, and EM Round to Offer

I've been reading everyone's interview reports here on the forum, so now that I've got an offer, I wanted to give back with my own.

11.12 — Phone Screen

It was a question from a coding-practice site — I don't remember the specifics. Follow-up: if you keep inserting numbers that are bigger than the last one at the end, how do you update it? And what if you insert random numbers regardless of size, how do you update it then?

12.3 — Super Day: VO1 + VO2 + HR

VO1 was a lottery system question plus a problem about finding the deepest bracket depth in a string (a LeetCode original, but I don't remember the number). The prompt was:

Create a lottery storage system that would allow you to add, remove and pick participants. This storage system must run at O(1) and participants must be picked at random.

Functions to implement:

• LotterySystem() — create the Lottery object
• boolean addParticipant(int id) — add a participant (unique id); return true if successfully added, false if it cannot be added
• boolean removeParticipant(int id) — remove a participant (unique id); return true if successfully removed, false if it could not be removed
• int randomPick() — randomly select a lottery winner and return their ID; return -1 if there are no participants left

VO2 was an "alien defense system" question, might have been an original — the setup was a 2D grid where you place a turret to protect the maximum number of houses, and the turret can protect any house within Manhattan distance k. The interviewer said the implementation was too hard, and moved on to the next question after I explained my approach. The second question was also a 2D grid: shortest path from top-left to bottom-right, but there are walls in the way and you can break through at most k walls (a LeetCode original — BFS plus a dimension tracking how many walls you have left to break through solves it). The interviewer said I wrote it too fast and gave me one more question — an AtCoder problem called "adventure." I didn't solve it, but they still passed me.

Then HR — simple questions about my resume plus some basic behavioral questions.

12.15 — EM

I got lucky here — it was just resume grilling and basic behavioral questions, and we were already at the Q&A part 35 minutes in. I was panicking, thinking I was about to get rejected, but I ended up passing. Thanks to the interviewer 🙏.

12.17 — Offer Call

Overall, Bloomberg's process was the best experience I've had out of every company I interviewed with — the whole hiring process was clear from start to finish. Barring any surprises, I'll probably be going with them.