Goldman Sachs | Associate | Bangalore, India | March, 2021 [Offer]

A classic dynamic programming problem where you need to find the number of unique paths a robot can take to reach the bottom-right corner of a grid, starting from the top-left corner, only being able to move down or right.

Given a m x n grid filled with non-negative numbers, find a path from top left to bottom right, which minimizes the sum of all numbers along its path. You can only move either down or right at any point in time.

You are a professional robber planning to rob houses along a street. Each house has a certain amount of money stashed, the only constraint stopping you from robbing each of them is that adjacent houses have security systems connected and it will automatically contact the police if two adjacent houses were broken into on the same night. Given an integer array nums representing the amount of money of each house, return the maximum amount of money you can rob tonight without alerting the police.

Given an array of strings strs, group the anagrams together. You can return the answer in any order. An Anagram is a word or phrase formed by rearranging the letters of a different word or phrase, typically using all the original letters exactly once.

Design an API rate limiter system. This involves discussing high-level design (HLD) aspects such as choosing appropriate data structures, synchronization mechanisms, and handling distributed environments.

I was asked about the applications of Decorator, Dependency Injection, and other design patterns. The interviewer required me to write sample Java code for each pattern to demonstrate understanding.

There is a new alien language which uses the English alphabet. However, the order among letters are unknown to you. You are given a list of words from the alien language's dictionary, where the words are sorted lexicographically by the rules of this new language. Deduce the order of the letters in this language.

Merge k sorted linked lists into one sorted linked list. I was asked to discuss various approaches to solve this problem, and we also explored a scenario for merging sorted lists online (stream processing).

Design a Job Scheduler using message queues. This involves high-level design (HLD) considerations, including how jobs are queued, processed, and distributed, and how message queues facilitate this process.

The hiring manager round involved discussions about my ongoing projects, development lifecycle experiences, and my motivations for wanting to join Goldman Sachs. This was a non-technical assessment of my fit with the team and company culture.