BNY Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process

The first round was a technical screen focusing on Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA). I was given a pattern-making question. I was able to solve it and present both a brute-force and an optimized solution. However, the interviewer was not very supportive and had very high expectations, asking questions that seemed unrealistic for a college student unfamiliar with real-world company systems.

The interview started with a coding challenge on HackerRank, featuring easy to medium LeetCode-style problems involving arrays, strings, and trees. Practicing these types of problems should make it straightforward. Following that, there was a whiteboard session where similar coding questions were asked, but the emphasis was on clearly explaining your approach. The process also included a section on System Design and Databases, covering basic design principles like scaling and APIs, as well as SQL, including queries, indexing, and normalization.

So, I had a really bad experience with this company. They called me out of the blue from a private number, like six months after I applied. They wanted to do an HR interview, so we set a time. I prepped, but they called an hour late. It was super short, like five minutes, and just to schedule the next interview, not really a prescreen. For the tech interview, they didn't tell me much, just to have my IDE ready. I thought it would be DSA, but they hit me with tech stack questions and made me code a simple thing on the spot. The interview was about two hours. The interviewers were nice and the questions weren't hard, but the format totally threw me off. I knew I messed up and expected a rejection, but what really got me was the silence. No feedback, no rejection email, nothing. They never closed the loop. After two hours, they could've at least sent something, even an automated rejection. Super disappointing.