Goldman Sachs Interview Questions — Page 2

Goldman Sachs·Machine Learning Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Apr 2026

Took a 70-minute online assessment for an ML Engineer role at Goldman Sachs. Pretty standard fundamentals stuff but the time pressure was real and a couple of the calculations tripped me up more than I expected.

You're given four confusion matrices for a binary classifier. Which one(s) have a True Positive Rate of 0.80 and a False Positive Rate of 0.10?
Given weights w=[0.5, -1.0], input x=[2.0, 1.0], and bias b=0, compute the pre-activation z and the sigmoid output to three decimal places.
For multi-class single-label classification, which activation function belongs in the output layer, and why are ReLU-style activations preferred in hidden layers over sigmoid or tanh?

“Had to actually compute TPR and FPR for each option instead of eyeballing it.”

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Goldman Sachs·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Went through what felt like a behavioral-heavy loop for a PM role at Goldman Sachs. Four questions, all situational, no product cases or metrics deep-dives which surprised me a little given the company.

A high-impact product emerges in your space that your team has little familiarity with. How do you get yourself and the team up to speed, and what resources do you turn to?
Tell me about a time you chose an option you were initially less enthusiastic about. How did you weigh the tradeoffs?
Describe a project you were personally invested in that got derailed by circumstances outside your control. What did you run into, how did you respond, and what kept you going?
Walk me through a workplace example that shows how you've applied the core skills required for this role.

“I spent too long talking about myself in my answer before pivoting to the team upskilling part.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE interview with a data structures implementation question. Pretty straightforward coding round but the constraint of not using built-in hash tables means you actually have to think through the internals, which tripped me up a bit.

Design and implement a HashMap from scratch (no built-in hash table libraries allowed) that supports put, get, and remove operations on integer keys and values.

“I knew what a hash map was conceptually but actually building one without reaching for the language's built-in felt weird.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round at Goldman Sachs for a Software Engineer role. Two scenarios, both leaning into the messier side of professional life: navigating a team that doesn't want you there, and figuring out what to do when your manager asks for data you probably shouldn't just hand over.

You've just been made team lead by your manager, but one collaborator openly pushes back on the decision and challenges your authority. How do you handle it, and how do you communicate with the collaborator, the rest of the team, and your manager?
You're the sole engineer on a project that holds sensitive data like customer PII or security credentials. Your manager asks you to share that data or grant them access. What do you do?

“This one is trickier than it looks because the instinct is to either avoid the conflict or immediately escalate to your manager, and both feel like the wrong move.”

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Goldman Sachs·Product Manager·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Goldman Sachs PM interview that threw a classic string compression algorithm question at me, which felt a bit out of left field for a product role but apparently they do this. No behavioral fluff, just jumped straight into the technical stuff.

Design a string compression algorithm that replaces consecutive repeating characters with the character and its count (e.g. 'aaabbc' becomes 'a3b2c1'). Walk through both compression and decompression, handle edge cases like single-character runs or inputs where compression actually makes the string longer, and give a full time and space complexity analysis.

“I started with the happy path, two pointers scanning through the string, count runs, append char plus count.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE interview, got a classic data structures question that sounds easy until you're actually coding it under pressure.

Implement a queue using two stacks.

“I knew this one from practice but still fumbled the amortized complexity explanation.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE interview with a Pascal's triangle problem. Pretty standard coding round, nothing too wild.

Given a row and column index, return the value at that position in Pascal's triangle.

“Classic problem but I second-guessed myself on the indexing.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Two-part technical interview for a quant engineering role at Goldman Sachs. The first half was a conceptual deep-dive into sampling methods, and the second half had me coding a biased random walk on a manifold live, which was a lot more involved than I expected.

Walk through the main methods for sampling from a target probability distribution, covering inverse CDF, rejection sampling, MCMC, and importance sampling. What are the trade-offs and when would you reach for each?
Write a sampler for a biased random walk on a manifold (like a sphere or torus): how do you parameterize positions, propose steps that stay tangent to the manifold, apply a bias toward a target region, and handle accept/reject?

“This part actually went okay.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round for a quant engineer role at Goldman Sachs. Pretty standard stuff, nothing too surprising. The sense I got is that for quant/strats roles this round is more of a warmup than a real filter, so don't stress it too much but don't skip prep either.

Tell me about a time you dealt with a conflict at work.
Describe a situation where you had to take on significant responsibility or ownership.
Can you give an example of a time you faced an ethical dilemma and how you handled it?
Tell me about a time you had to learn a new skill quickly.
Walk me through a complex problem you solved and how you approached it.

“Had a story ready for this and it landed fine.”

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Goldman Sachs·Product Manager·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Goldman Sachs PM interview that threw a digit-sum algorithm problem at me, which felt like a weird left turn for a product role. Not sure what they were testing exactly, maybe just how you think through a technical problem under pressure.

Given integers 1 through n representing lottery coupons, a winner is someone whose coupon's digit sum equals some value s. For all valid values of s, find how many distinct values of s produce the maximum number of winners. Implement this as a function and explain the time and space complexity.

“I stared at this for a bit because my first instinct was to just loop through every number, compute digit sums, and tally them up.”

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