Goldman Sachs - Summer Analyst

This was my very first interview ever, and I was quite nervous going in. Fortunately, the interviewer was extremely warm and made me feel comfortable right from the start.

He began with: “Tell me something that's not mentioned in your resume.” I took this chance to talk about my role as the Technical Head at QCM (Quizzers’ Club MANIT Bhopal). I explained how we manage the QCM website , from storing quiz data, using Apprite as a Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS), to how we conduct timed quizzes, use Role-Based Access (RBA), and more.

This led to a detailed and engaging discussion about the technical aspects of the site.

Then came a DSA problem:

"Given two strings A and B, find the minimum length substring of A such that it contains all characters of B (order doesn't matter)."

I began with a brute-force solution (O(n²) time), which I coded out. The interviewer then asked me to optimize it, so I implemented a sliding window (two-pointer) approach. I explained the optimized logic thoroughly, and he was happy with my thinking process , he didn’t even ask me to write the optimized code.

The interview concluded with a few HR-style questions around teamwork and conflict resolution.

This round focused entirely on a deep-dive into one problem.

After a brief introduction, the interviewer presented the following challenge:

“Given a grid with a start cell and an end cell, and coins placed in each cell, find a path from the start to the end that maximizes the total coins collected.”

I initially proposed solving it using DFS, and the interviewer asked, “Why not BFS?” I explained that BFS is more suited for minimizing things like shortest paths, but here we needed to explore all possible paths to maximize coins , making DFS more appropriate. He agreed.

Next, we discussed the time complexity of the brute-force DFS (which is exponential), and I suggested optimizing it using Dynamic Programming (DP). I explained the memoization logic in detail, and he was quite impressed.

He then asked me to implement the code. I wrote a clean solution with minor debugging, and he seemed satisfied with both the code and my approach.

This was the final round and primarily HR-based, but it still had a technical twist.

The interviewer started with a discussion about my resume , particularly my Walmart Sparkathon project. He asked what changes I would implement if I were to rebuild the project from scratch with more experience. I shared a few architectural improvements and design decisions I’d make now.

Then came a surprise: He gave me a problem to solve without specifying the expected approach. I instinctively solved it using a DSA method, which he said was fine, but then asked me to solve it using SQL (MySQL).

Initially, I fumbled a bit. But with some hints and support, I was able to come up with the correct SQL solution. The interviewer appreciated my resilience and learning mindset.

We ended the round with classic HR questions like:

“Why should we hire you?”

“Why is Goldman Sachs important to you?”

I answered honestly, focusing on my passion for tech, eagerness to grow, and how opportunities like this are rare and invaluable at my institute.