Goldman Sachs Interview Experience: Assosciate
Summary
I cleared the online assessment, technical DSA rounds, and the superday, and received an offer from Goldman Sachs.
Full Experience
Company: Goldman Sachs YOE: 3+ Location: Bangalore
Online Assessment
Hackerrank Platform 3 Questions: 1 easy, 2 medium
Cleared and got mail in ~1 week for interviews.
Round 1 (Technical DSA ~1 hour)
Asked 2 DSA questions (coding on shared editor):
Problem 1: Implement pow(base,exp)
Problem 2:
You are a rock collector who lives in southern california. Some rare desirable rocks just became available in New York, you are planning a cross country road trip. There are several other rare rocks that you could pick up along the way. You have been given a grid filled with numbers, representing number of re rocks available in various cities ccross the country. The objective is to find the optimal path from So_cal that will allow you to accumulate the most rocks along e way. Note: you can either travel north [up], east[right]
Cleared and superday scheduled after 2 days
Superday
Round 1 (DSA ~1 hour) A brief discussion on resume, what challenging situations you faced, what is ElasticSearch, inverted index, idf algorithm.... Q1:
You are working on a platform that runs N microservices such as:
DataBases(e.g PostgreSQL, MongoDB)
Message Brokers(e,g. Kafka clusters)
Cache Layers(e.g, Redis)
Other microservices (e,g, Auth service, Payment service)
For example, the Order Service cannot start until the UserDB is running and the Kafka Cluster is ready. Similarly, the Notification Service cannot start until the Payment Service is up.
Your Task:
You are given:
n- total number of microservices/infrastructure components
dependencies - a list of pairs[A,B] meaning service A cannot starts until service B is up.
Return a valid deployment order for all services and components.
Q2:
Given unsorted transactions:
- transaction{
- trxId,
- AccountId,
- timestam,
- amount
- }
Find max total amount spend in any 24-hour period
Round 2 (System Design ~ 1 hour): Questions on resume and work i do, some questions on sofware engineering principles, How you leverage use of AI tools in your daily tasks?,
This round mainy focused on system design.
Design notification system:
- notification service 10 15 application,
- it should be able to send -- email, sms,
- data model , tech stack, apis, application, reporting service,
new features can be added,
Follow ups: How would you host, one of the application sending millions of records and they have messed up and encountered infinite loop--> how will you handle this case, how will you create kafka partitions --> before and during event dispatch, API gateway, Aws services etc.
Interview Questions (5)
Implement Power Function
Implement pow(base,exp) – Write a function that computes base raised to the power exp.
Maximum Rocks Collection Path
You are a rock collector who lives in Southern California. Some rare desirable rocks just became available in New York, and you are planning a cross‑country road trip. There are several other rare rocks that you could pick up along the way.
You have been given a grid filled with numbers, representing the number of rocks available in various cities across the country. The objective is to find the optimal path from Southern California that will allow you to accumulate the most rocks along the way.
Constraint: You can only travel north (up) or east (right).
Microservice Deployment Order
You are working on a platform that runs N microservices such as databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB), message brokers (Kafka), cache layers (Redis), and other services (Auth, Payment, etc.). Some services depend on others (e.g., Order Service cannot start until UserDB and Kafka are up).
Task: Given n – the total number of microservices/infrastructure components – and dependencies, a list of pairs [A, B] meaning service A cannot start until service B is up, return a valid deployment order for all services and components.
Maximum Spend in 24‑Hour Window
Given an unsorted list of transactions where each transaction contains:
trxIdAccountIdtimestampamount
Find the maximum total amount spent in any 24‑hour period.
Design Notification System
Design a notification system that supports sending email and SMS notifications. The system should handle multiple applications (10‑15), include a data model, choose an appropriate tech stack, define APIs, provide reporting capabilities, and be extensible for new features. Discuss hosting, handling high‑volume message bursts, fault tolerance (e.g., infinite loops), Kafka partitioning, API gateway, and relevant AWS services.