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BlackRock Interview Experience for Software Engineer(Analyst) Internship | On-Campus 2021

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BlackRock visited our Campus on 22nd August (VIT Vellore) for hiring in the roles of Software Engineer, Portfolio Management Group (PMG) Technology Role, and Financial Modeling Group(FMG) Quantitative Developer Role. I applied for the role of Software Engineer Role and will be explaining the whole process for the same.

Eligibility Criteria: 6.0 CGPA and above, No Standing Arrears.

Round1 (Online Test):  About 900 people were shortlisted for the Online test inclusive of all the roles. The test was taken on a platform called elitmus. It consisted of 3 sections : 

  1. Aptitude Section: This section consisted of several sub-sections like Logical Reasoning, Attention to Detail, etc. with different time limits for each of the sub-sections. My advice to crack this round will be not to stick and waste time on a single question but instead, try to solve other questions because of the constrained time limits.
  2. Programming Ability: This section had algorithm design questions that were in the form of a flow chart with different steps to complete the algorithm stated in them and some blank spaces in between to be filled by us. Basic knowledge in algorithm design and a little reasoning can help solve these kinds of questions. This round had MCQ questions that focused mostly on TREE data structure with multiple questions on traversals and AVL TREE insertions and deletions. My advice will be to study the TREE data structure properly to gain some advantage in this section.
  3. SQL: This section entirely focused on questions related to SQL queries, syntaxes, aggregate functions, and DBMS concepts. My advice will be to have enough practice on SQL from websites like Leetcode and Hackerrank.

Round2 (Technical Round): About 80 students for the FMG/PMG roles and 150 students for the Software profile were shortlisted for the interview process. The interviews for both the profiles were taken on two different and consecutive days. The interview links were received by mail after confirmation from the elitmus team and were taken on the Cisco Webex platform.

The interview went for around 60-65 minutes and was taken by two interviewers. It started with an introduction from me and one of the interviewers directly starting with a DSA questions. Two problems were asked and I had to code them on a compiler of my choice by sharing my screen. The questions that were asked were as follows:

  1. Shortest distance between two nodes in BST: I directly gave an approach to find the lowest common ancestor of the two nodes and then finding separate distances between the Ancestor node and the two nodes and returning the sum of the distances. I was then asked to code the whole solution which I correctly completed.
  2. First non repeating character in a string: I started with a Brute force approach O(n^2) and then eventually explaining them the optimized O(n) solution using count array/HashMap. The interviewer was happy with my explanation and went on to the next question.
  3. The interviewer then gave me a schema of an employee table that had fields including employee name, employee city, employee salary, etc. I was asked to write a query to print employee names with the same salary.

This was followed by the second interviewer giving me another DSA question: 

Find next greater number with same set of digits: I was asked to just explain the approach and apply it on the test cases given to me by them, which I correctly showed.

This was followed by a set of core JAVA questions :

  • Difference between == and .equals() ?
  • Mention some methods of the object class?
  • Difference between TreeSet and SortedSet?
  • How is a String saved in JAVA?
  • difference between string pool and heap memory?

This was followed by a puzzle for which I was not prepared at all. 

  • The question was: Given two hourglass of 4 minutes and 7 minutes, the task is to measure 9 minutes?
  • I fumbled a bit but came up with a similar kind of approach but not the correct answer. I asked for some more time but they wanted to just see the approach which I applied.
  • The interview ended with the interviewers asking me if I had any questions? I asked them about the projects that they work on and the intern conversion ratio to FTE.

15 minutes later after the interview, I got a call from HR for the interview.

Round 3(HR 15 minutes): This round was a telephonic conversation with HR. 

  • The interview started at around 8:15 pm and since it was very late the interviewer told me that she wasn’t able to set up a video meeting and asked if I am okay with this round continuing as a telephonic conversation itself. 
  • I happily agreed and it started with a brief introduction from HR followed by a small intro from myself. 
  • Then she asked me some general questions about my hobbies, tech stack, and language I am comfortable in, availability for relocation, and previous internship experience. 
  • Then she asked if I had any questions and I happily asked about life at Blackrock and her experience as a Blackrock employee.

Results: Results came out the next day via email from the college and I was selected for the internship.


Last Updated : 01 Sep, 2021
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