I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Mar 2026
Interview
Applied online, then had usual HR screen screening and several remote interviews. I applied for 3 roles, but you can only interview for 2 simultaneously, which I did. First were two online coding rounds. Not too hard, roughly Leetcode medium, but be sure you can tell the big-O complexity of algorithms and containers you are using, they will ask. Then I had a system design interview with one of the teams which a failed. A typical system design problem, but I never had this kind of interview and was very rusty on db-centric apps. I asked for a couple of weeks to prepare before doing one for the second team. They agreed, but ran me through another live coding interview before the second system design one. The coding was another Leetcode medium which I think went OK-ish, but the system design was not what I expected. They presented a slide with their real system and asked questions around it. I think I gave OK-ish answers and the vibe was good, but still got a rejection email same day. What was disappointing is that someone with finance trading/experience would clearly have a significant advantage with such a design problem. Since they don't even mention finance experience in job ads, I felt it was unfair. So anyone interviewing should take time to learn about the team and system design problems relevant to their work. Recruiter communication could be improved also, they did not make it clear which interviews are scheduled on site, did not respond to my email feedback request.
Terrible communication. Got passed between 3 different recruiters all of whom gave specific dates for updates and blew past them. Descriptions of what would be covered in the interviews are wholly inaccurate (don’t bother reading the PDF they sent to “prep” you, almost none of it came up in any of the 3 interviews I did with them.)
Interviewers themselves were decent but clearly had exact “right” answers they were looking for. What’s the point of a leetcode question where there’s only one way to implement it? What’s the point of a system design interview where you’re having a candidate parse through a complex system that they clearly already know everything about and are just looking for 1-2 EXACT modifications to check off their boxes? Was there even a right answer? I genuinely don’t know what this company was looking for. Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of resources. Avoid, avoid, avoid
Interviewed with two separate teams. Coding rounds. Leet code style question. The interview went on for 1 hr. Waiting for the next steps. The seem to like link lists and arrays