Goldman Sachs Interview Experience

Every year, Goldman Sachs hires interns for it’s Bangalore office under the Engineering Campus Hiring Program. It is an American-based Investment banking company and it is known for it’s rigorous hiring procedure. I had applied for the Summer Internship program for the April-July intake.

Round 1: Aptitude Test

The applications were open between last week of November to begning of January. And I recieved the test link for first online round which was the Aptitude Test on 13 January and the test was on 16 January. So I had only 3–4 days to prepare. The Aptitude Round consists of 4–5 Sections:

• Reading Comprehension
• Logical Reasoning
• Abstract Reasoning
• Diagramatic Reasoning
• Numerical Aptitude

The test tries to measure overall thinking capability of a candidate. It can be easily cleared with some level of preparation as the questions were mostly of medium level. I had practiced reasoning and aptitude questions from Indiabix.com.

Round 2: Technical Test

On 5th Feb I recieved a mail that I have cleared the first round and the next round will be a technical assessment. And the test was scheduled on 27th February. So this time, I had enough time to prepare. There were 4 sections in the test with some specific time alloted to each section:

• Coding Questions
• CS Fundamentals
• Quantitative Aptitude
• Subjective Questions

Usually the technical test consists of 5 sections with one more section on Advance Coding which was ommited this time. The coding section had 2 questions of medium level in 30 mins. So here, the main constraint was time. First question was a variation of 0–1 Knapsack and second one was diagonal traversal of a matrix. I was able to solve only first question. CS fundamentals section consisted of 7 easy-medium questions in 25 mins. I had practiced questions from GeeksforGeeks. Quantitative Aptitude has some JEE Mains-Advanced level questions. So I had to refer class 12 JEE books and revised Probability, Premuations and Combinations, trigonometry and some other chapters. Subjective Questions had 2 descriptive type behavioral questions which were real-life situation based. In this round, considering college CGPA as a section, you need to clear cutoff in atleast three sections to move ahead.

Round 3: Interviews

On 19 March, I recieved a mail that I have cleared the technical assessment and there will be interviews scheduled in upcoming weeks. On 22nd March they mailed that there will be interviews on 24th March. We were given a Zoom link and we had to be present in the meeting from 10AM to 5PM.

I joined the meeting at 10 AM and saw that there were 80 other candidates. We all were put into breakout rooms where we had to wait for our turn.

Interview 1: Technical [Coding + CS Theory]

At 10:20, I was put into another breakout room where my interview started. My interviewer was very friendly and he began the interview with his itroduction followed by my intro. As I mentioned that I had won a hackathon, he asked me to elaborate upon the project I had built. He then started with asking technical questions like what is LinkedList and what is Palindrome. He then gave me a question to code, that is detect a palindrome in linked list. So I explained my approach and then coded it out. He was satisfied. Then he asked me about differences between linked list and array, when to use what. He also asked me if there is any data structure which has benefits of both. Then he went on and gave me another question. Which was a dynamic programming based question. I coded the recursive approach and explained memoized approach and he was satisfied and ended the interview.

Interview 2: Technical [Projects + Coding]

From 80 candidates around 50 were called for the second interview. My interview started after 3:30 pm. The interviewer was a lady and she was a bit strict. She started off with my introduction and then she asked me about projects I had worked on. I initially mentioned about skin disease prediction application, then she asked me if I have any other project so I mentioned about my final year project that is online bus booking system. She asked me to code out Node js APIs that I had implemented in the project. So I coded 2 of them and I explained how I will be using elastic search for efficient searching of buses and implementation of some other features. She went in quite detail of the project. She also asked me about password encryption. Then she gave me a coding question based on heap data structure. I explained the approach, coded in the hackerrank codepair and she was satisfied and the round was over.

Interview 3: Technical [CS Theory]

Now it was already past 5 pm, so I was not expecting any more interview rounds. But at around 6:20, I was sent to another breakout room for the third round. This time, I was expecting some HR kind of questions but again this was a technical round. The interviewer directly jumped to the Hackerrank codepair and asked me write and explain the features of OOP. I explained all 4 of them in detail with examples. Then he asked me if I knew about hash and hashing techniques, so I described them in detail and then he asked me any disadvantages of hashing which I explained with example. And the interview ended.

Final Offer

After about a week of interviews, on 1st April, I recieved a mail that I have been offered Summer Internship role for Summer 2022.

Preparation Plan

Goldman Sachs is known for asking puzzles in interviews, So I had prepared all the puzzles from GeeksforGeeks but I wasn’t asked any. The company is also known for the typical HR questions that it asks like How does GS earn money? Tell some latest news about GS? Why is GS different from its competitors? I was not asked any of these questions as I had all technical interviews. But those preparing for Goldman Sachs should be prepared to answer such questions. While preparing for interviews, I had solved coding questions from GeeksforGeeks with GS tag. For CS theory questions I had referred to Interview Bit and prepared for questions from topics like OS, DBMS, OOP and Java. For coding questions, I had solved Love Babbar’s DSA Sheet. For those preparing for the interviews, should go through as many interview experiences as you can on GeeksforGeeks and Medium.

You can read about my internship experience here. For any queries, you can email me — mansikalaria16@gmail.com. Do give a clap if you found this article useful and follow me for more such articles :)