Bloomberg full loop, rejected after two-problem phone screen

Bloomberg full loop, rejected after two-problem phone screen

Sharing my full loop, five rounds total, since I didn't see much on the newer coding questions before I went in.

Phone screen was one 60 minute call, straight from a short chat about how I scaled a service I'd built into two coding problems back to back. First one was Shortest Path with Gas Stations, a BFS over a grid where certain cells act as stations that change how far you can hop, wanted shortest stops to reach every reachable cell. Second was the balloon popping problem, rotting oranges with multi source BFS, and the follow up turned it into weighted shortest path once spread times varied by cell. Interviewer probed edge cases the whole time, inclusive versus exclusive boundaries, cells that can never be reached, wanted me talking through it instead of just typing.

Onsite got scheduled for the next day. Two more coding rounds, one system design round on a real time market data pipeline handling packet loss and duplicate events across exchanges, and a behavioral round that turned into a deep dive on a system I'd built before. Heard back about a week later and got rejected. No idea which round it came down to tbh, everyone just seemed neutral in the room.