Interview Experience - Goldman Sachs - Analyst - 2yrs

I applied for the Analyst role at Goldman Sachs through a referral and received an Online Assessment link within a few days.

Round 1 - Online Assessment

This round consisted of two coding questions:

• One question involved using a stack to remove substrings where a character appeared K or more times consecutively.
• The second was a queue-based problem where I had to simulate a given problem statement.

Round 2 - Coderpad

This round also had two coding questions:

• A standard Grid Dynamic Programming problem.
• The classic problem of merging N sorted arrays into a single sorted array.

Superday

My Superday comprised three intense rounds conducted on the same day.

Round 3 - Data Structures

This round focused on data structures and algorithms:

• I was given a sorted integer array and an integer 'k'. The task was to maximize the frequency of any number by distributing 'k' among elements (incrementing them) until 'k' was non-negative. For example, with [1,3,5,8,10,11,12] and k = 3, the answer is 3 (incrementing 11 by 1 and 10 by 2 results in three 12s). I discussed brute force, binary search, and sliding window solutions.
• The second question was a standard Dynamic Programming problem on stocks.

Round 4 - Software Engineering Practices

This round delved into software engineering concepts and problem-solving:

• A problem revolved around finding shortest paths on exchanges, specifically involving negative costs. I explained the limitations of Dijkstra's algorithm and then detailed Bellman-Ford and Floyd-Warshall algorithms.
• Another problem was a standard sliding window question, which was exactly "Fruit Into Baskets" from LeetCode.

Round 5 - Software Design and Architecture

This was a system design focused round:

• We started with an in-depth discussion about my current projects and Kafka.
• Following that, I was given a problem statement similar to "Design Twitter". I thoroughly explained the Functional Requirements (FR), Non-Functional Requirements (NFR), APIs, Entities, and High-Level Design (HLD). My HLD included components such as Load Balancers, Microservices, Caching, CDNs, Asynchronous Processing, S3, DynamoDB, and various Fan-out services. It was a very engaging and insightful discussion, and I learned a lot.

An hour after the Superday, I received a call from HR, informing me that I needed to attend a Hiring Manager round at their office.

Round 6 - Hiring Manager Round

This round primarily focused on behavioral questions, exploring my past experiences and how I handle various situations.

I am now waiting for the final result for the Compliance Analyst role.