Bloomberg Entry-Level Software Engineer Interview: London New-Grad Loop
Updated July 17, 2026
The candidate, an IT-engineering new grad, applied for an Entry Level Software Engineer role in Bloomberg's London office. The process opened with a phone screen: general questions drawn from the resume, a discussion of a past project and the challenges it involved, and a set of algorithm questions worked through on a shared HackerRank screen. Each solution was followed by a request to state its time complexity and push the optimization further, which led the candidate to reach for hash maps for faster lookups.
A video interview followed in a similar format, adding an interval-merging problem plus one greedy and one dynamic-programming question. The final stage was an onsite day in London, with travel and one night of accommodation arranged by Bloomberg. The day began with an office tour and an informal group breakfast with the interviewers, then moved into a two-on-one technical round, an HR conversation, and a second technical round with a senior manager; some candidates were let go after the first technical round while others continued through the remaining two.
How the process went
Application background
An IT-engineering new grad applied for an Entry Level Software Engineer role at Bloomberg's London office.
Phone screen
A 1:1 call covering resume and project questions, followed by algorithm questions solved on a shared HackerRank screen; the interviewer pressed for time-complexity analysis and further optimization on each solution.
Video interview
A second 1:1 round in a similar format, adding an interval-merging problem plus a greedy and a dynamic-programming question.
Onsite travel and arrival
Bloomberg arranged round-trip travel and one night of accommodation for the London onsite. The day opened with an office tour and an informal group breakfast with the interviewers.
Onsite technical round
A two-interviewer, one-candidate round covering project deep-dives and two problem-solving/design questions. Some candidates were told to leave after this round; others continued to the remaining two rounds.
HR round
A 1:1 conversation focused on motivation for joining Bloomberg and cultural fit.
Second technical round
A 1:1 round with a senior manager covering resume follow-ups, language comparisons, and data-structure fundamentals.
Follow-up
The candidate was told to expect a response within about a week after each stage. Overall, the loop ran from the initial phone screen to the final onsite round over roughly four months; the write-up does not report a final decision.
Phone Screen
Resume and project background, followed by algorithm questions on a shared HackerRank screen
- Describe a project you've worked on and the challenges you faced.
- Design a class to store a news story, including author, history, title, and content.
- Write a method to sort stories by history (i.e., most recent first).
- Fetch the top 100 stories from the collection.
The interviewer asked for the time complexity of each solution and pushed for further optimization; the candidate used hash maps for faster retrieval.
Video Interview
A second background conversation plus three algorithm problems
- Tell me about yourself.
- Merge a set of overlapping intervals, e.g., ([2,5], [3,8], [11,15], [14,18]) into ([2,8], [11,18]).
- A standard greedy-algorithm problem.
- A standard dynamic-programming problem.
Onsite Technical Round 1
Two-on-one round covering project depth plus a data-analysis/design problem and a string problem
- Tell me about yourself.
- Extended questions about several of the candidate's listed projects.
- Given viewing-completion counts for each episode of a series, find the episode watched by at least 70% of the viewers who finished the whole series.
- Design the classes and data structures needed to support that functionality (e.g., a User class and a Series class), and justify the choices.
- Find the minimum number of insertions, deletions, and swaps needed to turn one string into an anagram of another.
The candidate was also asked to dry-run the code and walk through test cases and edge cases. After this round, some candidates were told to leave while others continued to the HR and second technical rounds.
HR Round
1:1 culture-fit conversation
- Why do you want to join Bloomberg?
- Do you have any other offers?
- Where do you see yourself in five years?
Framed in the write-up as assessing cultural fit and likelihood of accepting an offer, alongside other general questions.
Onsite Technical Round 2
1:1 with a senior manager, covering resume follow-ups and language/data-structure fundamentals
- Follow-up questions drawn from the resume, similar to earlier rounds.
- Why do you want to join Bloomberg?
- What's the difference between Java and C++, and when would you use each?
- How would you sort a list of stocks and continuously fetch the top 100 while new items are added dynamically?
- How are heaps and binary search trees structured, and how are hash maps and sets implemented internally in C++?
Key takeaways
- Be ready to state and justify the time complexity of every solution, then push it further; nearly every round here followed a working answer with an optimization request.
- Review how core data structures work under the hood in your interview language (hash maps, sets, heaps, binary search trees) — the final onsite round asked about internal implementation directly.
- Prepare a few projects in real depth; both the phone screen and the first onsite round spent significant time on project specifics, not just algorithms.
- Treat the HR/culture conversation as a real evaluation step rather than a formality — it directly probed interest in the company and likelihood of accepting an offer.
- Expect informal moments (an office tour, a group breakfast with interviewers) to be part of the onsite day alongside the formal technical rounds.
Practice a Bloomberg interview
Rehearse out loud against the kinds of questions in this story — with an AI interviewer that asks follow-ups.
Practice this interviewSource
The questions and process facts come from the candidate's public write-up, linked below. The retelling above is our own summary.
Candidate's public write-up on LeetCode Discuss