Goldman Sachs | Associate | Bengaluru | Aug 2024 [Reject]

I recently interviewed for an Associate position at Goldman Sachs. My background includes 3 years of experience at a well-known product company.

My interview process started with an Online Assessment (OA) that lasted 2 hours. It included two coding problems:

• One from LeetCode: Better Compression of String
• Another problem called Cutting metal surplus.

Following the OA, I had Round 1 (Coderpad) for 1 hour. This round also focused on coding:

• House Robber
• A slightly modified, easier version of Robot Bounded In Circle.

Next were the Superday interviews.

Round 2 (Data Structures) was a 1-hour session. I was asked:

• Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling, which I later realized was a LeetCode hard problem. I could only manage to come up with a brute-force solution during the interview.
• A custom linked list reordering problem: given 1→ 2→3→ 4->5→6→7→ 8, the output should be 1->8->2->7->6->3->5->4. I was able to devise an optimized approach but ran out of time to fully code the solution.

Round 3 (Software Engineering Practices), also 1 hour, involved a detailed discussion about my work projects and a series of rapid-fire scenario questions. The specific questions included:

• Questions on how to increase API response time.
• Why I chose SQL over NoSQL for a specific project.
• What ACID compliance means.
• How to handle cascading failures between microservices.
• My approach to database server failure and recovery.
• Another linked list coding problem: given a->b->c->a1->b1->c1->…an->bn->cn, the output should be b->c->a->b1->c1->a1->…bn->cn->an. I coded a solution but couldn't identify a bug in it during the interview.

I felt my confidence dropped during the project discussions, which affected my performance on the subsequent coding question. I ultimately received a rejection after this stage. I sensed that the interviewers in the last round were not entirely convinced by my answers regarding project design and system design scenarios.