Bloomberg SDE interviews don’t just evaluate your problem-solving skills; they place even greater emphasis on your system thinking and communication abilities. In technical interviews, algorithm questions—such as designing a data structure to handle a continuous data stream—are actually testing how you use balanced binary trees (for example, map in C++) to optimize search and merge logic while handling complex edge cases. Behind these questions lies a strong focus on system design thinking.
Bloomberg VO Timeline
Sep 21: Referral submitted
Sep 26: Application Submitted
Oct 3: Phone Interview Invitation
Oct 24: Phone Interview – 25 minutes of résumé discussion plus Why Bloomberg, followed by solving LeetCode 445.
Nov 28: VO Invitation – On-campus slots were fully booked, so a virtual interview was scheduled for Dec 7.
Dec 7: Back-to-back interviews
Bloomberg Interview Experience – VO Round 1
This round was a pure coding interview. After a brief self-introduction of about five minutes, we moved on to solving coding problems.
Question 1: Given an array, you may delete at most one number (or delete none). Determine whether it’s possible to make the frequency of occurrence of every number the same.
Solution approach: First, use a hash map freq to count the occurrences of each number, then use another hash map freq_of_freq to count how many numbers share the same frequency. If freq_of_freq has only one entry, the frequencies are already equal. If it has two entries, let them be (f1, v1) and (f2, v2). If one of the frequencies appears exactly once (v = 1) and that frequency is either 1 or exactly one greater than the other frequency, removing one occurrence of that number will make all frequencies equal (e.g., aabbc or aabbccc).
Question 2: Given an encoded string in the form of 3[a3[b]], decode it to produce the expanded string, e.g., abbbabbbabbb.
Solution approach: Use a stack simulation. Maintain a current string curr. Append letters to curr as you scan. When you see a number, push the number and the current prefix onto the stack and reset curr (skip the [). When you hit ], pop the previous string pre and repeat count f, then set curr = pre + curr repeated f times.
Bloomberg Interview Experience – VO Round 2
First, we went over my résumé for about 15 minutes, then moved on to the coding part. I was given a secret string and a guess string of the same length. For each index: if guess[i] equals secret[i], print *. Otherwise, print + if guess[i] appears somewhere in secret; if it doesn’t, print -.
As a follow-up, the interviewer asked about the time and space complexity, then modified the question to ask how the solution would change if we also needed to account for character frequencies.
Solution approach: First, put all characters from secret into a set, then iterate through the strings and output the result accordingly. The time complexity is O(n), and the space complexity is O(k).
Follow-up solution approach: Each character can only be matched a limited number of times, turning the problem into the correct counting logic used in Wordle/Bulls and Cows. Characters in the same secret string cannot be reused indefinitely for + matches. In a second pass, handle the remaining +/- cases by checking the remaining frequencies to decide whether a + can be assigned. The time and space complexities remain unchanged.
Bloomberg Interview Experience – VO Round 3
The third round was an HR interview. I was asked to introduce myself, followed by several standard behavioral questions (BQ).
- Why bloomberg？
- Most interesting project？
- What new thing did you learn about bloomberg from your previous interviews?
- Two things you are looking for when you apply to jobs?
Overall, the interview experience was very positive. The interviewers were all friendly and polite, and the communication atmosphere was open and engaging. After the interviews, the interviewer mentioned that HR would reach out soon. The official timeline is that results will be shared within seven business days. I’ll come back to update once I hear the outcome—hopefully good news will be knocking on the door.
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