BlackRock Interview Experience for SDE

Round 1 | Screening Round | 1st September | 8 am

Number of applicants: 997

Level: Medium – Hard

Platform: eLitmus

Duration: Somewhat 1 Hr 30 min or 1Hr 45 min

• Timed sections on various topics like:
  • Aptitude
  • Reasoning
  • Verbal
  • Flowcharts
  • SQL
• All sections will be timed and there will be a window after each section where you can take a break after every section.
• For every question you can answer, go previous or skip for the time.
• When all questions of the section are done then the system will throw the skipped question so don’t panic and waste your time on questions that you are not able to do at that moment.
• Just do all the questions as fast as possible.
• The DSA will be easy to medium.
  • Most questions in DSA was from tree data-structure, specially BST formation, preorder, postorder, and formation of the same.
• The toughest question was from the critical thinking :
  • There was a problem statement and there was flowchart for that particular problem, for example platform assignment for a train.
  • You have to analyse the pseudo code and understand the flow chart.
  • There were 3-5 question on one flowchart.
  • There were around 2-3 flow-chart.
  • Every flow-chart was very big, bulky and contained around 5-8 decisions.
  • There were some empty blocks in the flow-chart which we had to fill by understanding the flow chart and by options given in the mcq.
• Last section was SQL, all about DBMS, do have a closer look to DBMS, specially very in-depth topics which no one teaches.

Round 2 | Technical Interview 1 | 5th September | 9 am

Number of applicants: 146 (150 were in the waiting list as well)

Level : Easy -Medium

Platform: Webex

Duration: 30 – 45 minutes

The interviewers were very nice and calm, they were helping me now and then and they only wanted to see my experience lever from my answer and no bookish language required.

Questions were as followed:

1. Tell me about yourself.
2. Tell us about your recent interview experience.
3. Why did you use the current tech stack in your project, why not other ?
4. Which architecture did you follow in your project ?
5. What is the most difficult file that you have written in NodeJS ?
6. What is the difference between relational and non-relational database ?
7. What do you understand by tokens, specifically JWT ? (because i have done various project in MERN stack)
8. What do you know about cookies ?
9. What is OAuth, explain with example ?
10. DSA: (only verbal explanation)
    1. Identify loop in a linked list.
    2. Tell us about the time complexity of the code.
    3. Real life based question, which eventually led us to the discussion of sorting algorithms :
       1. All sorting algorithms.
       2. Difference between all of them in terms of space and time complexity.
       3. Difference between merge and quick sort.
       4. Algorithm of merge and quick.
       5. Which of the above is better in which circumstances ?
       6. Which one to use in the given question and why?
11. Why do you want to join BlackRock ?

After 45 minutes i received mail for HR interview.

Some people had round 2 of interview as well, if you perform very well you directly go to HR round.

Round 3| HR Round | 5th September | 12:15 noon

Number of applicants: Not known

Level : Easy -Medium

Platform: Webex

Duration: 15 – 20 minutes

Questions asked :

1. Introduce yourself ? (not more than 1 minute)
2. Tell me about your experience in your previous internship.
3. What do you know about BlackRock ?
4. Why do you want to join us ?
5. Are you open to learning new tech stack and roles or you want to only go into development?
6. What are your thoughts on doing masters ?
7. If you have a family business and you want to help them then why not to start from now ?
8. Tell me a recent software you developed which has helped others in some or the other way.
9. Do you have any questions for me ?

Result declaration:

Same day the result came.

50 students got the offer, my name was 3rd from the top.