An R&D manager at Bloomberg contacted me through LinkedIn to apply for the role.

The first round was a technical phone interview. The interviewer asked me about one of my projects and how I designed it. He changed requirements and discussed various scenarios, asking how I would adapt the design. Then, there was a simple question on adding two very large numbers using a linked list.

The next round was at their Princeton office a month later. I had two technical interviews.

• The first interviewer asked questions on Data Structures, such as the complexities of various operations (insert, search, delete) on data structures like arrays, linked lists, heaps, stacks, and trees.
• Then, there were questions on networking and operating systems. I had taken an OS class more than a year ago and hadn't taken any computer networking classes during my graduate studies. The interviewer seemed surprised by this. Unfortunately, I didn't revise these topics and struggled with those questions.
• Next, there was a simple problem of opening and closing bracket validation, which I solved but didn't engineer well.

The subsequent round focused on concepts of OOP, language design, and garbage collection. I believe my performance in the first round had already made a bad impression, and the second round concluded earlier than the interviews of other candidates.

After lunch, there was a brief discussion of 5-10 minutes with an HR person, covering questions like what interests me in Bloomberg.

How do hashtables work?

Validate the opening and closing of brackets in a string.

What interests you about working at Bloomberg?