I started by applying to their internship online. Within a day or two, I received an email asking to schedule a phone interview, which I had the following week. The phone interview lasted about an hour, and the interviewer mentioned it ran slightly over time. Most questions focused on simple algorithms for handling information. Knowledge of basic data structures such as hash tables and linked lists is recommended.

After another week, I was invited to New York City for an on-site interview. I scheduled this through Bloomberg's HR. The process was quite straightforward; they covered flight and hotel expenses.

At the on-site interview, I had three main interviews plus a behavioral assessment. First, I had a technical interview with two engineers for approximately one hour. This was followed by a similar technical interview with another two engineers, also lasting about an hour. The final technical interview was with the group manager, lasting roughly another hour. These interviews were entirely technical, covering topics such as object-oriented design, implementing simple functions, and data structures.

About a week later, I received a call from the recruiting department informing me that I had been offered the internship.

Given a large dataset of people, distinct phone numbers, and non-unique names. How would you store the data so that you could efficiently look up someone's data by phone number?

By name?

What about partial searches, i.e., a few letters of the name?