Technical Interview Report: Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg - Spring Boot Stack (4 Rounds)

If you are prepping for a Senior Software Engineer role at Bloomberg, you'll want to buckle up. I recently went through their 1-hour technical screening, and it was a dense, fast-paced session that touched on everything from high-level architecture to LeetCode-hard problem-solving. Here is the breakdown of what to expect and the specific technical challenges I faced. The Interview Structure: The session was strictly timed at 60 minutes, divided into four distinct segments: Project Deep Dive: A discussion on my previous experience and architectural decisions. SQL Assessment: Relational database querying. Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA): Live coding. Spring Boot Practical: A hands-on look at REST API design. Part 1: SQL - Aggregations and Filters The SQL portion wasn't designed to trick me with obscure syntax, but rather to test my comfort with window functions or subqueries. The Challenge: Given an Employee table (id, department_id, salary) and a Departments table (id, name); Find th