Goldman Sachs interview notes, page 3 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

May 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE interview had at least one probability question that felt more like a math exam than anything coding-related. Not what I was expecting going in.

Given a random variable X with PDF f(x) = 0.5 * e^(-|x|) for all real x, compute P(2 ≤ |X| ≤ 4) rounded to three decimal places. Options: A. 0.117, B. 0.018, C. 0.135, D. 0.068.

“I stared at this longer than I'd like to admit.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Quant Engineer interview at Goldman Sachs, technical round focused on dynamic programming. One problem, but they pushed hard on the optimization follow-ups which is where things got interesting.

Given an m by n grid of non-negative integers, find the minimum-sum path from the top-left to the bottom-right cell, moving only right or down. Implement a solution in O(m*n) time using dynamic programming, then discuss how you'd optimize space using in-place modification or a rolling array.

“Got the base DP working fine, that part was almost muscle memory.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Did a technical round for the DevOps SRE associate role at Goldman Sachs in London and walked out without writing a single line of code. The interviewer kept redirecting every question into a conceptual discussion, so what I expected to be a coding exercise turned into something closer to a verbal theory exam.

Given a forest of tree nodes, solve the related traversal or structural problem.
Implement a counter and calculate the number of hops in a cycle.

“I knew the answer.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Goldman Sachs SWE coding round, pretty much a classic sliding window problem with a twist. Nothing too wild but the follow-up tripped me up a bit.

Given a string, find the length of the longest substring that contains no repeated characters. Follow-up: return the actual substring, not just its length.

“I knew the sliding window approach going in, so the main part was fine.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

System design round at Goldman Sachs for a SWE role. Just one question but it took up the whole session and went deeper than I expected.

Design a version control system like Git.

“I started with the basics, blobs, trees, commits, and thought I was doing fine.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Goldman Sachs software engineer interview with a coding question around simulating robot movement on a grid, plus a follow-up on design extensibility. Pretty straightforward technically but the second part tripped me up a bit.

Given a string of direction commands like 'U', 'D', 'L', 'R', simulate a robot moving on a 2D grid using a switch/case dispatch and return the final position or full path.
How would you handle mixed-case input like 'u' or 'l' alongside uppercase commands, and how would you redesign to support more commands without expanding a giant switch statement?

“The core part was fine.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Goldman Sachs data science interview with a math optimization problem that looks deceptively clean but has some real teeth if you haven't thought about it before.

Given that a + b + c + d = 63, find the maximum possible value of a*b + b*c + c*d.

“I stared at this longer than I'd like to admit.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026

Goldman Sachs software engineer coding round, two questions back to back. Pretty standard stuff but the second one tripped me up more than I expected.

Given a string, return the first character that appears exactly once. If none exists, return an empty value.
Given a list of name-score pairs where a person can appear multiple times, return the highest average score across all names.

“Went with a frequency map, two passes through the string.”

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Goldman Sachs·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Goldman Sachs ML Engineer coding round, two back-to-back implementation problems covering decision tree logic and linear regression. Pretty standard stuff for the role but the details matter a lot and they're watching how you handle edge cases.

Implement a Gini impurity function and a best-split finder for a binary decision tree classifier, where the split minimizes weighted Gini impurity across all features and candidate thresholds.
Implement a single gradient descent update step for linear regression with mean squared error loss, returning the updated weights and bias.

“The gini function itself took me maybe two minutes.”

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Goldman Sachs·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Behavioral round for a software engineering role at Goldman Sachs. Two questions, both pretty standard, but the academic integrity one threw me a bit more than I expected.

Tell me about a project you're proud of. What did you build, what was your role, and what impact did it have?
If a classmate takes credit for your work, like submitting your code as their own or claiming your contribution, how do you handle it?

“Pretty standard opener.”

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