Goldman Sachs software engineer candidates report a CoderPad or HackerRank coding stage, then a Superday mixing DSA, system design, and resume deep dives, often ending with a hiring manager conversation.
$143K
Avg. Base Comp
$176K
Avg. Total Comp
3-5 rounds
Typical Rounds
2-5 months
Process Length
Candidates describe the Goldman Sachs software engineer interview as a coding screen followed by a Superday that mixes algorithms, design, and a detailed look at your resume. Early rounds are typically CoderPad or HackerRank, and reported problems include Trapping Rain Water, median of two sorted arrays, BFS, min-heap questions, and House Robber-style dynamic programming. Several candidates say interviewers cared as much about narrating your approach and complexity as about the final answer. One candidate who started down the wrong path on a heap problem and corrected course out loud later accepted an offer.
System design appears in some, but not all, reports. Prompts include high-frequency financial transactions, a cache, a web crawler, a TinyURL-style service, and a booking platform. Others report SDLC questions on pull requests, CI/CD, Agile, and story estimation. Resume depth is the most repeated theme. One candidate said almost every CV detail was fair game, and another was asked why Kafka over other messaging tools. Prepare to defend the technology choices behind each project.
A few candidates reported smaller surprises: a student-average problem that required careful floating-point and negative-number handling in Java, and probability puzzles such as expected rolls to get two sixes. Final conversations are usually with a hiring manager and lean behavioral. Communication delays after the final round were also reported, so ask for a decision timeline. Reported outcomes were mixed, with offers and rejections both appearing.
Synthesized from 111 candidate reports by our editorial team.
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Real interview reports from people who went through the Goldman Sachs process.
The part of my Goldman Sachs process I'd most want someone to prepare for was the second Superday round, which had nothing to do with whiteboarding. Getting there took a while, though, so here's the full path. The early stage was an online coding and maths assessment with about one and a half to two hours on the clock. The problems themselves were fairly easy, so the real challenge was pacing yourself. After that came a HireVue video interview, and then the Superday, which was a run of interviews with different teams. Some of those teams asked me to walk through my CV and gave a few brainteasers, so be ready to tell your own story clearly and quickly.
The first Superday interview was a 45-minute DSA session built around a single medium problem. Getting a working solution wasn't enough, because it needed a binary search style optimisation to pass all the test cases. If you start with brute force and stop there, you will fail the hidden cases, so think about whether the answer can be searched for rather than computed directly.
The second interview was also 45 minutes, and it was the one that caught me off guard. I had to navigate an existing codebase with an AI assistant and fix the bugs that had been outlined for me. The skill being tested felt closer to what the job actually looks like day to day: reading code I hadn't written, figuring out where the problem lived, and deciding when to trust or question what the assistant suggested. I'd recommend practising on an unfamiliar repo and narrating each step out loud.
Scheduling was the slowest part of the whole thing. Once interviews were on the calendar, though, the stages moved quickly. I haven't heard back from the team, and this process is recorded as ending without an offer.
Prep tip from this candidate
Drill medium DSA problems where a brute-force approach fails and you need to binary search on the answer space to pass all test cases. Also practise opening an unfamiliar codebase and fixing outlined bugs with an AI coding assistant, narrating each step as you go.
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Topics based on recent interview experiences.
Featured question at Goldman Sachs
Given a string, write a function to find its first recurring character.
| Question | |
|---|---|
| Find the First Non-Repeating Character in a String | |
| Bagging vs Boosting | |
| Size of Joins | |
| Level Of Rain Water In 2D Terrain | |
| Google Maps Improvement | |
| Append Frequency | |
| Cyclic Detection | |
| Minimum Absolute Distance | |
| Production Model Monitoring | |
| Success Measurement | |
| Target Indices | |
| Portfolio Platform Architecture | |
| Cross-Region Inventory Sync | |
| How Many Friends | |
| Messenger Service Design | |
| Optimistic vs Pessimistic Locking | |
| The Longest Journey | |
| Cloud-Agnostic Deployments | |
| SageMaker Deployment Architecture | |
| Deciding Between Solutions | |
| Impossibly Iterative Fibonacci | |
| Shortest Path Algorithms | |
| Alternative Vendor Tradeoff | |
| Client Solution Pushback | |
| LRU Cache 1 | |
| Using APIs for Downstream Tasks | |
| 2nd Highest Salary | |
| Employee Salaries | |
| Merge Sorted Lists |
Synthesized from candidate reports. Individual experiences may vary.
Some candidates report starting with a recruiter or HR call that covers availability, background, and sometimes the programming language to use. A few also describe a HireVue-style recorded round with resume and behavioral prompts. Not every candidate mentions this step, so treat it as common but not guaranteed.
Candidates report a HackerRank-style assessment or a CoderPad round with LeetCode-style problems, typically easy to medium and sometimes harder. Reported examples include BFS, string manipulation, cycle length in an array, and median of two sorted arrays. Interviewers appear to value talking through approach and complexity while coding.
The Superday is reported as several shorter back-to-back interviews, often around 45 minutes each. Candidates describe DSA problems such as Trapping Rain Water, dynamic programming, heaps, and stack questions. Some also report system design prompts like caching or TinyURL, plus SDLC and Agile questions. The mix varies by candidate and team.
Candidates repeatedly report detailed questions about past projects, including why specific technologies were chosen, tradeoffs, and personal contribution. One candidate with a microservices and Kafka background was pressed on scalability limits and failure scenarios. Expect to explain decisions, not just list tools.
Several candidates describe a final hiring manager round that is largely conversational, covering experience, communication, motivation, and team fit. One mentions using STAR stories, and another reports a light system design component. Candidates also report waits of weeks after final rounds, so ask the recruiter about timing.
