Goldman Sachs

I applied for the Software Engineering Intern position at Goldman Sachs through the off-campus process. The recruitment process started with an online assessment that contained coding as well as technical questions. The coding section mainly focused on DSA. I came across problems involving arrays, strings, hashing, and basic data structures. The questions were manageable individually, but the overall time pressure made the assessment challenging. There were also some technical questions around programming fundamentals and SQL. After completing the OA, I received the interview invite. The first technical interview lasted around 45–60 minutes. It started with a brief introduction and then moved directly into problem solving. The first problem was based on an array and initially looked fairly simple. I explained a brute-force solution before trying to optimize it. The interviewer then asked me to reduce the complexity and discuss why the optimized approach would work. I eventually reached the intended solution and coded it. The second problem involved a graph. This one took considerably more time because I initially approached it using the wrong traversal strategy. After going through a couple of examples and discussing the constraints, I realized where my approach was going wrong and switched to a better method. I was able to explain the final approach, although the implementation took most of the remaining time. There was also a short discussion about my projects. The interviewer asked about my contribution, backend architecture, and some of the technical decisions I had made. A few questions on OOP and SQL were also included. I progressed to the final interview round. This discussion had a mixture of technical and resume-based questions. I was asked to explain one of my projects in depth, including why I selected a particular technology and how I handled certain edge cases. The interviewer also asked another DSA problem, this time involving a tree. I was able to derive the approach and explain the complexity, but I made a couple of implementation mistakes while coding. I corrected one of them after tracing the example, but the round ended before I could completely polish the solution. After the final interview, I waited for the result. Eventually, I received the update that I was not selected for the internship. The overall process was a good learning experience. The interviews tested more than just whether I knew common DSA patterns. I had to explain my thinking, react to changes in the problem, justify complexity, and discuss my projects in considerable depth. My biggest takeaway was that solving a problem mentally and implementing it accurately during an interview are two different things. I realized that I needed to spend more time practicing implementation under time pressure and becoming comfortable with unfamiliar variations of standard DSA problems.