BlackRock Junior Software Engineer in the USA: screening questions, two resume-plus-DSA rounds and a behavioural final

Initial Tech Screen

I applied online and got an email back from a recruiter with a link to some basic screening questions. The first one was Valid Parentheses and then another BFS LeetCode problem very similar to Lowest Common Ancestor.

Tech Interview 1

After that was a live coding interview. First round they asked me questions on my resume (describing projects I had done in uni and about an internship I had done the summer before). There were some theory questions on OOP, stuff like inheritance, method overloading and overriding. Finished with another DSA question which I'd seen before which was just check if a string is a palindrome.

Tech Interview 2

This round was similar to the last, focusing first on my CV and experience before moving into three DSA questions.

• Reverse a number: Write a method to flip an integer (e.g. 10502 → 20501)

• Word frequency: Count the occurrences of words in a string, which I solved using a map.

• Variable swap: Swap two numbers without using a temporary variable. I had seen this one before in uni.

Behavioral Interview

The final round focused more on behavioral questions, teamwork, communication. I remember they asked me something like "Tell me about a time in which you worked as a team to overcome a challenge", and an example of a time I had gone above and beyond.