I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Bloomberg (London, England) in Oct 2023
Interview
After passing first round remote coding interview, I had on-site interview for two teams with three rounds for each team (hour long coding and design and half hour of speaking to department manager). Coding problems were not complex, but attention to details and accuracy are expected and assessed. Design question was with open solution, and for senior level expectations of system design are high.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a trading venue infrastructure, capable of real time matching of client orders
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