Company: Goldman Sachs
Role: Associate
YOE: 3 years
Education: Tier 1
Current Company: MNC in Banking/Financial Services sector (SDE-2)
Recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn for the position.
Round 1: Hackerrank Test
- 2 very easy coding questions related to arrays and simple logic.
Round 2: DSA
-
Started off with a Puzzle:
Suppose a lizard is currently at one corner on the floor in a room and it has to reach the diagonally opposite corner on the ceiling. What is the least distance it has to cover ? (Tip: The lizard can't fly) -
https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-subarray-sum-with-one-deletion/description/ (slight variation)
The next 4 rounds were scheduled on the same day.
Round 3: DSA
-
Implement the Comparable and Comparator interfaces and use the compare methods to compare two objects.
-
A string is given as input like "4591206562" and input array is provided like [2,5,9,4,3,7,0]. You can replace any number in the input array with the digit at that abs(index) in the string. For ex. 5(on 7th index) can be replaced with 7. What is the maximum string that can be produced ?
-
A variation of the above problem. The difference is that the input array can also contain negative numbers and if we select even numbers of negative numbers to replace in the string then that becomes positive. And if we select odd numbers of negative numbers then string becomes negative. Again, what's the maxiumum string that can be produced ?
-
Check 2 cousin nodes in a binary tree.
Round 4: Software Engineering practices
- https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock/description/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock-ii/description/
- How to manage scenarios when we can also return negative max profits or it is mandatory to atleast one buy and sell?
- Questions on full outer joins
- Given a scenario what will be the best sorting technique?
- Arraylist and its implementation in JAVA
- Garbage collection. Types of garbage collectors. Impact of garbage collection on application perfromance. Garbage collection algorithms.
- SOLID priniciples concepts.
Round 5: Design and architecture
- Discussion about the problems that I have solved in my current ongoing projects and asked a related question to design a particular functionality.
- Why do JOIN queries get slower when there is an "OR" expression in the join condition ?
- Questions related to dependency inversion and why is it required and how do I implement it in my projects.
- Questions related to the advantages of Spring Boot over SpringMVC and Web Servlet architecture.
Round 6: Hiring Manager Round
- SDLC principles used in my project
- Diff between Agile and waterfall models and why is the former preferred.
- Other standard behavioural questions.
Verdict: Selected.
PS. Took around 50-55 days from HM interview to get the offer letter