I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at FactSet (Norwalk, CT) in Oct 2012
Interview
Gave them my resume at university career fair and got a phone call to schedule a phone interview with their market data team a week later.
Phone Interview:
The interviewer was a senior software engineer who had been with FactSet with more than 6 years. He asked me to describe some important projects on my resume and then went on to ask basic data structures and C++ related questions, no coding at all only concepts. The interview went well and I got a request for on-site interview at their Norwalk office.
On-site interview:
The on site interview started with a "light" breakfast and demo of their product and a small executive talk. First round was C++ code review (1:1). They gave me 5 pages of poorly written (but compilable) C++ code and asked me to find mistakes. Typical mistakes I found were memory leaks, infinite loops, poorly designed functions, poorly designed class interface etc. The interviewer seemed reasonably happy with my review.
Second round was about design (again 1:1). I was expecting an object oriented game design type question but he picked up a project from my resume and asked me to extend the design to meet certain security requirements. The problem was quite open and I was not sure what he was expecting. But, I thought I did okay in this one.
Then came the data structures and algorithms round (this was 2:1). They asked me to code atoi function and finding lowest common ancestor of tow nodes in a tree. I did the first problem pretty quickly. And presented an algorithm for the second one. But, they wanted a more efficient solution. I was able to come up with few improvements but before I could improve it further to their satisfaction they said the time was over and that I had to call it quits. While leaving the two guys said "good luck" to me and I knew that was a bad sign. I think this round hurt me the most.
Then there was 45 min lunch with another engineer. Casual, "get to know", kind of affair.
Fourth round was 1:1 interview with director of the team. He asked me resume related questions and was basically trying to gauge my attitude/skills , where I would fit in the team etc.
Fifth round was typical HR interview.
All in all, it was a good experience. They paid for all the travel and living expenses and were generally nice/friendly.
Got a thank you email after a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
code atoi function and finding lowest common ancestor of tow nodes in a tree
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at FactSet (London, England) in Feb 2026
Interview
3 rounds of interviews.
1 behavioural interview, 1 technical interview (leetcode), 1 system design interview
all interviews were online.
Increasing word count to thirty. This is annoying bla bla bla bla bla
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
System Design:
Design google docs with version control.
Standard with 4 rounds including a phone interview and a HR interview. The product demo is the intro, after which a tech and HR rounds occur back to back. Usually takes 3.5 hours after the 1 hour phone interview
I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at FactSet (Hyderābād) in Dec 2025
Interview
It was a very casual interview. I was told the interview would start at 8:45 AM but it started around 10 AM. The interviewer was very friendly and walked me through my thought process towards solving the given problem. There were two rounds of interviews, purely technical though I did not get shortlisted for the second round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers, and an integer k, what is the length of the longest subarray of the same consecutive integers we can get if we can remove any k elements from the array.
