Bloomberg interview notes, page 13 of 14

Large Enterprises

Most of these Bloomberg write-ups come from Software Engineers (130), then Product Managers (2) and Data Analysts (1). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (100), the behavioral / leadership round (8), the onsite coding round (8) and the system design round (8).

133 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE coding round, two questions back to back. Nothing too wild but the linked list one took me longer than I'd like to admit.

Given two strings, determine whether they are anagrams of each other. Must run in O(n) time and use O(1) extra space.
Reorder a singly linked list so all nodes at odd indices come first, followed by all nodes at even indices, preserving relative order within each group. In-place only, O(n) time and O(1) space.

“Pretty standard stuff.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE interview with a graph traversal problem set in a subway station context. Pretty standard BFS/DFS territory but they also wanted test cases on the spot, which tripped me up a bit.

Given a subway network represented as an adjacency map of station names, write a function that determines whether a path exists between two given stations. Stations not present in the map should be treated as having no connections.
Write test cases for your path-finding function covering cycles, disconnected components, the case where start equals end, and missing stations.

“I went with BFS, kept a visited set to handle cycles, and iterated through neighbors.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

Bloomberg system design round, one big question that basically ate the whole session. They wanted a full Kafka-style distributed messaging system and did not let you stay surface-level for long.

Design a distributed messaging system similar to Apache Kafka. Walk through the producer and consumer APIs, topic and partition model, broker cluster, replication and leader election, consumer groups with offset tracking, message ordering, at-least-once and exactly-once delivery semantics, throughput and latency targets, retention and log compaction, and how you'd scale to millions of messages per second across many topics.

“This is basically a full hour of design packed into one prompt.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE interview with a graph problem that kept getting harder. The follow-up twists were the real test.

Given a grid of balloons where popping one spreads to neighbors, but each cell has a different spread time, compute the total time to pop the entire grid.

“This is the follow-up that got me.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE interview focused on LRU Cache, but the angle was more OOP design than raw algorithm grinding. Pretty chill experience overall, nothing too brutal.

Design and implement an LRU Cache from an object-oriented perspective.

“The OOP framing was what made this interesting.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE interview with a tough grid/BFS problem involving gas stations. Just the one question described but it was a serious one.

Find the shortest path in a grid where you can refuel at gas stations, resetting your movement range each time you reach one.

“This one was rough.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE interview with a sliding window problem that looked straightforward but had enough edge case depth to keep me second-guessing myself the whole time.

Given an array of positive integers and a target value T greater than 1, count the number of contiguous subarrays whose product is strictly less than T. Your solution must run in O(n) time and use O(1) extra space. Also discuss edge cases like T <= 1 and arrays containing 1s, and explain why your approach is correct.

“Sliding window clicked pretty fast for me, shrink from the left when the product goes over T and accumulate the count.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE interview with a deep-dive behavioral/experience question about past projects. One question, but it had a lot of layers to it and felt more like a mini system design conversation by the end.

Walk me through one or two past projects that are relevant to this team. Cover the problem context, what you personally owned, key technical or product decisions you drove, trade-offs you made, who the stakeholders were, measurable outcomes, and what you learned. How would this background help you contribute in the first 90 days?

“This question looks like a standard 'tell me about a project' until you realize they want numbers, stakeholder dynamics, trade-off reasoning, AND a forward-looking pitch all in one answer.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SQL round for a software engineering role. One question, but it was a beast. The kind of problem where you think you understand it and then re-read requirement 3 and realize you don't.

Given a PostgreSQL table logging HTTP requests (method, path, timestamp), write a single SQL query that pivots request data for June 2021 into a report with one row per HTTP method and one column per day of the week (Monday through Sunday). Each cell should show the most popular file extension for that method on that weekday, NULL if no requests exist, and a sorted comma-separated list of tied extensions if there's a frequency tie. Paths without a dot should be excluded from extension counting, query strings stripped, and results sorted by method ascending.

“This wrecked me a little.”

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Bloomberg·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Bloomberg SWE interview with two back-to-back coding problems, one on string matching data structures and one on binary tree traversal with coordinate sorting. Pretty standard algorithmic stuff but the design discussion on part A went deeper than I expected.

Design a data structure with a build method that takes a list of words and a search method that returns true if any stored word can be obtained by changing exactly one character of the query string.
Given a binary tree where each node holds a letter, assign coordinates to nodes starting with the root at (0,0), left child at (row+1, col-1), and right child at (row+1, col+1). Return the concatenation of all node values sorted by column ascending, then row ascending, with ties broken left to right.

“I went straight to a hash-based bucket approach where you mask each character position and store the pattern.”

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