Application

The recruiter reached out to me. I interviewed at Goldman Sachs.

1. HR
2. Online coding session
3. Online coding session
4. Final Steps: 2 online coding sessions + 1 session with a conversation about technical details + 1 session with a conversation about the organization, projects, and your background.

Interview

First online coding interview: They asked me to solve a hard LeetCode problem (Median of Two Sorted Arrays). I solved the problem using the sorting feature of ArrayList. However, they asked me to optimize/refactor the solution with a better approach.

Second online coding interview: They asked me two questions. One was about testing and debugging (String to Integer (atoi) problem). The other was about solving the LeetCode High Five problem.

Final step: It took almost 4 hours. The interviewers were very helpful and nice. The HR partner called before the final round and gave me some information about the final step.

Interview Questions

Final Round:

1st session (Data structures): Some easy and medium LeetCode problems marked Goldman Sachs (Valid Parentheses). Calculating space and time complexity. Implementing Stack with Array. Stack and Queue: What are the differences? How do they work?

2nd session (Software engineering practices/testing/debugging): Solid, SDLC, debugging, logging, and what is your approach while adding a new feature or updating an existing feature? Testing (JUnit, Unit test, integration test). Questions about security. Hashing and storing passwords in a database. SQL Injection attack. How do you do secure deployment?

3rd session (Algorithms): Quick Sort, Merge Sort (complexity and explanation). Stack and Queue. Implementing stack with ArrayList. Some LeetCode problems focusing on HashSet and HashMap. Easy and medium LeetCode problems (266. Palindrome Permutation, 724. Find Pivot Index) - not coding, but talking about your solution and writing like pseudocode.

4th session (Software design/architecture, depth on CV): Mention about the Goldman Sachs environment, team culture, and roles.