I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Aug 2020
Interview
The interview process is a standard 1 hour 2 phone screens and a final round . There are two phone screens and one onsite. The recruiters are fantastic. The second phone screen interviewer however was really bad. I guess this was the first time he was conducting an interview. He arrived to the interview 10 minutes late. In addition to that he did not even have a prepared question. He was unusually silent with long pauses. Had no clue about what to talk or to ask. In addition to this, he was not audible at all. I mentioned it enough number of times to him. The interviewer was also walking out as one could hear the breeze in the call. For a simple binary tree based question he ended up typing a data structure on the coding screen. The interviewer genuinely made the interviewee feel uncomfortable. Now the phone screen involves both technical and a ML question. He gets the interview done in 45 mins. Remember we have only 1 hour and he is already 10 minutes late. Then he says I don't have time and so no more ML questions. So dismissive of another person's time, effort and credentials. I wish I had some other place to review the interviewer. I do also really hope Bloomberg make a check on the interviewers and train them with the basic etiquette on conducting interviews.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Oct 2018
Interview
Phone screening, then onsite:
- The phone screening contains a mix of coding (i.e., Cracking the Coding Interview-style) and ML (i.e., "solve use case X").
- The onsite involves coding, systems design, machine learning, probabilities, and discussions about past projects and interests.
On the overall, interviewing for Bloomberg was a great experience. The questions were challenging but fair, and the interviewers were both knowledgeable and empathetic. The use cases are built to reflect real problems, which gave me a lot to think about for my own research.
More generally, everyone seemed eager to discuss and get know the candidates, which gave me the feeling that I was talking with computer scientists rather than "formally" interview. The managers spent a lot of time answering all my questions, and all the engineers will gladly share their experience.
I would definitely recommend interviewing there if working in NYC is an option.
If you are lucky, you may even see a TV shoot..
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Use cases based on the team's experience, then "drill in" every ML technique you will mention