Goldman Sachs | Analyst | Interview Experience | 1.5 YOE

💻 Online Assessment (April 2025- 1st week)

The OA had two problems:

• An easy-level hashing question.
• The "Decode Ways" problem — a classic Dynamic Programming question.

👨‍💻 CoderPad Round (May 2025 - last week)

I don't recall the exact problems, but they were straightforward for anyone with a solid understanding of DSA. Both were solvable within time limits without much difficulty.

🧠 Superday Rounds (12 June 2025)

Round 1: DSA

This was a problem-solving round focused on data structures and algorithms.
The first question was a medium-level two pointers problem.
I explained the brute-force solution first and then optimized it in terms of time and space complexity.
Solved it within 25 minutes with detailed explanations and passed all test cases without any runtime or compile-time errors.

Since I solved it quickly, the interviewer gave me a harder problem — not to code but to explain the approach.
I quickly provided the brute-force idea and mentioned binary search for optimization.
However, I struggled to articulate the helper function. The interviewer said I was close, but we ran out of time.
After the round, I realized it could’ve been solved using a greedy approach in the helper.

Round 2: Software Engineering Practices

This round was entirely focused on resume, Java, and Spring Boot.

Topics discussed:

• Mockito: What it is and why it's used.
• Caching: Detailed discussion since I had mentioned it on my resume.
• Dependency Injection: Different ways to inject and their implementations.
• API Versioning
• Parameterized Queries in Spring Data JPA
• SOLID Principles and the DRY Principle
• Application Scaling: told about load balancers, microservices, caching, kafka, CDN, etc.
• Discussion on Horizontal scaling

While I was able to answer most questions, I did struggle to frame a few responses clearly. Despite that, the round ended on a positive note with the interviewer wishing me luck for the next round.

Round 3: System Design + Java/OOPs + SQL

This round had two interviewers, but unfortunately, the call dropped midway and only one interviewer rejoined.

Here’s what we discussed:

Started with “Why do you want to switch?”

Then, the interviewer presented a medium-level SQL question involving GROUP BY, HAVING, COUNT, and a subquery. I initially solved it correctly using LIMIT. However, the interviewer followed up by asking me to solve the same problem without using LIMIT. I wasn’t able to come up with an alternative solution during the interview.

Next, we discussed:

• Java version used in my project — I mentioned Java 8.
• Asked about Java 8 Features

Then was asked to solve two easy DSA problems using Stream API. I wrote working code, but the interviewer was expecting specific functional operations. I admitted I hadn't used Stream API extensively but was familiar with forEach, map, filter, etc.

We then had an in-depth discussion on:

• OOPs concepts, especially Polymorphism.
• Covered both compile-time and runtime polymorphism.
• Was asked to write code implementations for both.

After 40 minutes, the interviewer had no further questions and invited me to ask mine. I asked for feedback, but was told that would be shared by the hiring manager.

📞 Result

Unfortunately, I received negative feedback after the third round and was not selected. I struggled with a follow-up SQL question and wasn’t able to provide the expected answers for those two Stream API-related questions.