Goldman Sachs | Assoiciate | Bengluru [Reject]

College: Tier-1 IIT
Experience : - 2 years 4 monts as Java Backend Developer

The interview process was very long and time taking (it took almsot 2 months for the whole process to complete ).

Round :- 1

Hackerrank Test :- There are two easy level problems and has 2 hours to solve them , it took me 30 minutes to solve them. I did not remember questions , but they are easy .

Verdict :- Cleared

Round :- 2

Coderpair Round :

Here they asked me two questions .

1 - > there will be grid of size N*M which contain coins, find optimal path to collect most coins (only allowed north and east)

2 - > Given a list of students with their scores in different subjects find the student with a max average score. score is string and it can have negative value also .

They expected to run with some test cases and our code should pass all test cases .

Verdict :- Cleared

Super Day :- there are three rounds on same day with elimination in each round.

Round :- 3

Data Structures:
They asked me two questions :-
They asked me to code in Java only as this role is based on java

Question 1 :- https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-sum-circular-subarray/description/
Question 2 :- Given a list of students with their scores in different subjects find the student with a max average score. score is string and it can have negative value also .

They expected to run with some test cases and our code should pass all test cases .
I was able to solve them

They asked some questions related to concurrentHashMap like that because I used hashMap in my code .
Interview is easy but I generally code in C++ but here they expected Java .

Verdict :- Cleared

Round :- 4

Software engineering practices:
They asked about my past experience and related technical questions. Based on the flow I mentioned , they deep dived every where , These included:

Schedulers: questions about how schedulers work.
Database Choice: Why I chose NoSQL over MySQL.
Elasticsearch: Various questions about Elasticsearch functionality.
Spring Boot: Questions on core concepts and best practices.
JVM Architecture: They explored my understanding of JVM internals.

They also asked me to code a Singleton Class that works in a multithreaded environment. I implemented the code, the,y expected proper use of locking mechanisms and the volatile keyword for thread safety. I am able to do that and answer their questions on multi threaded .

Additionally, they asked about retry mechanisms, expecting knowledge of exponential backoff strategies.

They asle how to ensure data consistency between MongoDB and Elasticsearch if data is stored in both systems. I suggested using checksums, which led to further questions about how to implement and verify them effectively.

They also explored several Kafka-related questions, testing my understanding of message processing and stream handling.

Verdict :- Cleared

Round :- 5

Software Design and Architecture:
They asked me about my past experience, and I explained the high-level design of my recent work. They also asked for the low-level design, which I described. Then, they requested me to write code in an editor, expecting detailed MongoDB calls like findBy(). They asked me to write the exact code I used in my company for fetching data, but I couldn’t recall the entire code, which made it somewhat difficult for me. I wrote some pseudo-code, but it seems they were not satisfied with that.

Next, they asked about inter-process communication, but I couldn’t remember much from OS concepts. Then they asked about asynchronous communication, and I mentioned Kafka. They asked me to write implementation code for Kafka in a real project, but since I couldn’t recall the exact Kafka code, I wrote pseudo-code instead, which again seemed to disappoint them.

They also asked how many threads can run at one time in an instance. I answered based on the number of cores, which led to more questions about what a core is. Additionally, they asked about garbage collection algorithms and wanted a deep dive into all core concepts.

They also asked about heap dump and how will you get that .

This Interview was over in 45 minutes (I could not remember all question but these are some questions)

Verdict :- Rejected

I thought I did well but I never expected to write code for kafka and mongo and that will lead to my rejection .

This is my first interview experiance blog on leetcode , Kindly ignore if i did any mistake . I hope it will be helpful for someone .