Goldman Sachs interview notes, page 1 of 4

Large Enterprises

Most of these Goldman Sachs write-ups come from Software Engineers (30), then Product Managers (5) and Machine Learning Engineers (2). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (21), the behavioral / leadership round (6), the online assessment (4) and the onsite coding round (4).

37 interview notes · updated Aug 2026

Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE round focused on extending a fraud rules engine with MCC-based filtering. One coding problem, but it had enough layers to keep you busy for the full session.

You have an existing fraud rules engine. Extend it to reject transactions whose MCC code appears in a global blocklist, and also in a per-user blocklist (each user can have their own set of blocked MCC codes). The function signature stays the same. Keep the design extensible for future rule additions.

“The global blocklist part was fine, basically a set lookup.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE interview with a coding round focused on extending a fraud rules engine. The problem had real design weight to it, not just a leetcode warmup.

You're extending a fraud detection rules engine. Add a sliding 60-minute window check that rejects a transaction if the user's total approved amount within the past hour plus the new transaction's amount would exceed $5000. What data structure do you use, and what's the time complexity per check?

“I went with a per-user deque of (timestamp, amount) pairs.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs data science interview threw a probability puzzle at me that looked deceptively simple. Spent more time second-guessing my intuition than actually working through the math.

You roll a standard six-sided die repeatedly, adding each result to a running total, and stop when the total hits 100 or more. Between the numbers 1 and 6, which do you expect to appear more frequently across all the rolls?

“My gut said 6 because higher numbers feel more dominant somehow, which is completely wrong.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs software engineer interview with a coding round that leaned heavily on string manipulation and algorithmic trade-offs. The anagram grouping problem sounds straightforward but they pushed pretty hard on the complexity analysis side of things.

Given an array of strings, group all anagrams together and return them as a list of groups. Then walk through two different approaches: one using a sorted string as a hash map key, and one using a character count as the key. Analyze the time and space complexity of each.

“I went straight for the sorted-key approach because it's the one I'd practiced most.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE coding round, two algorithmic problems back to back. Both were harder than I expected for a screen and the second one especially had me second-guessing my approach the whole time.

Given an array of transaction values and an integer k, count how many contiguous subarrays of exactly length k are strictly increasing.
You have n software modules each with a difficulty score. Partition all modules into exactly 3 non-empty groups. For any partition, you pick one module from each group to minimize |d1 - d2| + |d2 - d3|. Find the partition that maximizes this minimized value.

“Felt manageable once I stopped overthinking it.”

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Goldman Sachs·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs PM interview with a meaty scenario question about leading a distributed, cross-border team. One question but it had about four layers to it, which I wasn't fully ready for.

You're leading a team spread across multiple divisions and countries. What concrete steps would you take to create a positive working environment, handle time-zone and cultural differences, regulatory constraints, and build trust among people who rarely meet in person? Walk through how you'd prioritize.

“The prioritization part at the end is what tripped me up.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs software engineer round focused on a transaction approval system, building it up incrementally with extensibility as the core concern. Pretty design-heavy for what looked like a coding question on the surface.

Write a function that approves or rejects a transaction based on its merchant category code, starting with a single rule (reject if MCC equals 9999), and design it so additional rules like blocklists and velocity checks can be added cleanly later.

“The first rule itself is trivial, one if-statement and you're done.”

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Goldman Sachs·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026

Behavioral loop for a PM role at Goldman Sachs. Six questions, mostly leadership and judgment focused, with a strong emphasis on cross-functional situations and personal decision-making under pressure. Nothing too left-field but a few of them require real stories, not just frameworks.

Walk me through your resume.
You're leading a team spread across multiple divisions and countries. How do you build a positive working environment and account for geographic and cultural differences?
A new product in your industry is gaining traction but your team hasn't engaged with it yet. How do you upskill yourself and your team?
Describe a time you chose an option you personally liked less because it was the objectively better decision. How did you think through the tradeoffs?
Tell me about a project you cared about that was derailed by something outside your control. What obstacles did you face and what kept you moving forward?
Give an example of how you've applied the core skills relevant to this PM role in a real workplace situation.

“Standard opener.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE interview that had me building a HashMap from scratch, which sounds like a warmup until they start asking about load factors and resizing. More design-heavy than I expected for what looked like a coding question on the surface.

Design and implement a HashMap from scratch without using any built-in hash-table libraries. Your implementation should support put, get, and remove operations. Be prepared to discuss your bucket structure, hash function choice, load factor, and resizing strategy.

“Started with the obvious array-of-linked-lists approach and felt pretty good about it.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Apr 2026

Two coding problems for a Goldman Sachs SWE round, both pretty self-contained but the second one had some sneaky edge cases worth thinking through before you dive in.

Given a string of lowercase letters, find the index of the first character that appears exactly once. Return -1 if none exists.
Given a list of student ID and score pairs where a student can appear multiple times, compute each student's average score and return the highest average across all students.

“Pretty standard frequency map problem.”

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