Goldman Sachs | Associate Software Engineer | Accepted | April 2025

I interviewed for Goldman Sachs for Associate level in March, 2025.

Education - Circuital branch, top IIT.

Experience - 2.8 years experience Past Company - SDE2 at Product Based Company (26.4 base + 2.6 Bonus) LPA. Had ESOPs.

Process -

Got a message from recruiter on linkedIn. Applied without referral.

Screening round - DSA - Two easy questions. Solved both. One was on hashmap little logic building, another on reversing linked list. They made me run both code on coder pad with few test cases.

Had next four rounds on the same day - Super Day. Initially they scheduled 3 rounds, post the result they scheduled the 4th one in evening.

Round1: 2 DSA problems, both around trees. One medium other one LC Hard(Both were on BST, had some discussions around 1st question on optimizing return , the other one involved finding LCA and some further solving). Round2: 1 LLD and questions around HLD - This round wasn't that great for me (fumbled a bit in few HLD questions). LLD - LRU cache. The interviewer tried to dig deep in whatever I said, so I chose to not answer questions I was not sure of. HLD was mostly related to how we optimize writes in DB, around replication, archival, scaling and indexing of DB. Round3: Mostly HLD case study regarding how you would approach a production issue. Had questions aroung my current experience, projects and their HLD and some related questions around possibilites of failure of production.

Had positive feedback from the rounds and was called for a final round with the hiring manager

Round4 - Hiring manager round - Was supposed to be a non technical round of 30 mins. Hiring manager still asked some design questions (mostly easy) along with a couple HR type ques. Answered all correctly.

Round5 - Behavioral round

Verdict - Got the offer. 36 LPA base + ~10 LPA bonus + 1.6L relocation + ESOP equivalency bonus (of current company for current FY)