I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Londres, Angleterre) 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
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Apr 2026
Interview
Drawn out / repetitive / redundant, overly focused on algorithms you won't use, matches candidates with teams that don't need them.
I started interviewing with 2 teams per their process, passed one and failed the other. The team I passed with then filled their role, so they had me interview with a 3rd team but had me start over from first round. I pass this AGAIN (so, to be clear, I've passed 2 out of 3 first rounds with 3 different teams), and then they have me do 2 second round interviews.
I made clear I had a lot of client-side experience with a high degree of skill in interface engineering and client architecture. The system design interview asked me basically to "build whatsapp," which is a backend distributed architecture problem. They weren't checking that I knew how a REST api works - they wanted to know about database redundancy with sharding and partitioning and so on, interservice data format pros and cons, message broker queue latency, scaling all these backend things....like, it was not basic stuff. They clearly wanted a distributed systems expert, and of course declined to move forward with my candidacy.
With this being the final result of 5 interviews, I expressed that I felt I was matched with the wrong team and received no reply. Kind of feel like my time was wasted.
Also, a portion of people I spoke with had no personality or warmth whatsoever.