Goldman Sachs | Interview Experience | Associate | Selected | Feb '25

Background

• College: Tier 1
• Experience: 4.5 yrs
• Current Company: SAP Labs

1. Online Assessment (Hackerrank)

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/group-anagrams/description/
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/count-number-of-teams/description/

I was able to complete it in about half an hour.

2. CoderPad

After a quick intro of me, the interviewer jumped right into the problem. And as soon as he entered the Q, there was a power cut at my place and I lost the internet connection. I quickly switched to my phone's hotspot and reconnected. I had not seen the Q that he had presented me with, but he changed that Q and I was then given the below problems to solve.

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/first-unique-character-in-a-string/description/

Gave the optimised approach directly, as I had already lost some time due to the power cut. Then he asked me to code it. There were some Qs around the approach as I was using C++ and perhaps the interviewer had more experience in Java. But I clarified all the doubts he had regarding the data structures I used.

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/description/

It was a variation with snow getting filled between the hills. You can find the Q at multiple places on the internet.

I gave the brute force approach first, then optimised it using max height arrays and coded the solution. Once the solution worked correctly, I slided in the fact that the problem can be solved using two pointers in a more optimised way. Seemed like the interviewer was not expecting it and since there was still 10-12 mins left, he asked me to code that approach as well. Which I was able to complete just in time.
After almost 2 months of waiting and thinking that the position might have already been filled by some other candidate, I out of the blue received the call from the recruiter for the next rounds and the super day was scheduled 2 days later.

3. Super Day

All the rounds had 2 interviewers where each interviewer came up with 1 Q each. All rounds were of 1 hour each which started with my introduction and ended with whether I had any Qs for them.

Round 1 - Technical (DSA)

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-population-year/description/

It took me a couple of minutes to think and come up with the optimised approach. Then I was able to code it pretty quickly.

1. Create a "Set" Data Structure with min. memory consumption.

   This was an interesting Q and revolved around math operations like mod, left shift, right shift, etc. The idea was to not use complete bytes to store the value in the array but to divide the bytes into bits and use each bit as a storage unit.

Round 2 - Technical (DSA + LLD)

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/partition-equal-subset-sum/description/

1. LLD - Design a food delivery application

The round went pretty smooth, I was able to solve both the problems.

Round 3 - Technical (DSA + LLD)

1. You have written "Design Principles" in your resume. Could you tell us about what design principles you have used in your projects?

   I had not revised design principles in months!! And there were cross questions on everything I was saying. It didn't go well.

2. Then he asked me to design the classes and functions (LLD) for a timesheet entry application. A tool that employees use in an organisation to put in their daily working hours.

   (The Q was detailed with multiple features he was interested in, but I don't remember all the details.) I even struggled in this Q. With just 10 mins remaining and I not anywhere near the complete solution, they decided to skip it and move to the next Q.

3. Given the r^th row and c^th column of the pascal's triangle. Return the value at that position of the triangle.

   The interviewer wanted me to come up with the recursive solution. He specifically mentioned that there is a formula for this but he doesn't want me to use that. I solved the problem in just under 3 mins (with code).

Received a call from the recruiter that the result of the last round was not good. It was a mix. Therefore, they would like to retake the round.

Round 4 (Round 3 again) - Technical (DSA + HLD)

I was presented with a long 8-10 lines of problem statement along with multiple enums, classes, methods and test-cases already written. I was supposed to complete the one empty method present in the program.

After a 15-20 mins discussion around the problem statement and clarifying all my doubts, the problem came down to something similar as https://leetcode.com/problems/optimal-account-balancing/description/ ( or Minimising the no. of transaction in splitwise). It was a variation in terms of transactions of buying and selling of assets.

I immediately told them the approach using 2 priority queues and explained how it would work. They asked me to code it. Since a lot of the time had passed in clarifying the problem statement and I was on the right track with my approach, they stopped me half way through the code stating that they were satisfied and would like to move to the 2nd part of the interview.

Then they asked me some Qs about scaling the same application (HLD). Some of the Qs were -

• What kind of database would you use?
• Database schema if SQL is used.
• API design
• How will you scale it?
• How will you keep it running all the time (availability)?
• What deployment strategy would you use?

The round went really well. Probably the best one so far.

Round 5 - Managerial

It started with my Introduction. Then we delved deep into the projects I worked on in my current organisation. I took my time and explained everything in detail. Answered all the counter questions in detail as well.

Then there were some other standard Qs like what the development lifecycle looks like in my current project. How do I debug an issue raised by a customer on the production system and how is the process different from what I do when I encounter bugs while testing my own development?

At last there were situation based Qs around ethics.

The Day finally ended and I was pretty happy with my performance.

4. HR Round

It was a standard HR Round where I was asked about my family background, why am I looking for a switch and why I want to move to Bangalore (my current location is Gurgaon)? What was my current compensation and what was I looking for?

Final Verdict - Accepted!!