As one of the top investment banks, Goldman Sachs recruits from school and Goldman Sachs OA is an important step to enter the next stage of technical interviews, especially for technical positions such as Engineering / SWE / Summer Analyst. OA is usually carried by the HackerRank platform. It has limited time, fixed question volume, medium difficulty and is combined with actual combat scenarios.
Goldman Sachs OA real questions & interviews - behavioral aspects are the main focus. Let’s take a look at Goldman’s interview/OA experience.
OA programming question direction
Judging from candidate feedback in recent years, Goldman Sachs’ OA does not pursue extreme algorithmic difficulty, but rather focuses on basic abilities and detailed processing.
A common question type is "hole counting": you need to count the number of isolated connected regions composed of 0s in a two-dimensional grid. It is essentially a graph search problem and can usually be solved by DFS or BFS. What really makes the difference is handling boundaries correctly, avoiding repeated accesses, and maintaining stable performance when the data size is large.
Another type of question is string processing, such as Snake_case Convert to LowerCamelCase, while retaining the leading and trailing underscores. This type of question is simple on the surface, but it tests the rigor of the code - special characters, continuous underscores, empty strings, etc. May become points. Many candidates "look finished" here, but lose points because of incomplete boundary processing.
A noteworthy trend is that investment banks are paying more and more attention to code readability and stability, not just problem-solving speed.
Interview process review
A typical process for a candidate is: receiving an on-site invitation shortly after submitting a resume online, and eventually changing to a phone interview because they are not in North America. The overall arrangement is two rounds of interviews, with approximately two interviewers participating in each round. The rhythm is compact but the structure is clear.
Unlike some technology companies, follow-up interviews for certain positions at Goldman Sachs may not necessarily involve a lot of algorithms, but focus more on the candidate's communication style, career motivation and teamwork potential.
First round interview
The first round is usually conducted by a VP and a Manager. The interview atmosphere was professional and the conversation was fast-paced, but there was no deliberate pressure created.
Questions often revolve around macro cognition and personal experience, such as how you view market changes in the next one to two years, whether you have experience in resolving team conflicts, in what situations you have demonstrated leadership, and why you chose Operations or related business directions.
The interviewer may also confirm actual job preferences, such as whether you would be comfortable working in a specific city. This type of question seems to be administrative, but in fact it is also assessing stability and job matching.
In summary, this round is more like judging whether you are a mature, reliable person who can cooperate with you for a long time.
Second round interview
The second round is usually led by two managers, and the question structure is more direct, but the examination dimension still focuses on behavioral capabilities.
Frequently asked questions include introducing yourself, why Goldman Sachs, why the team should choose you, how to communicate with team members, and whether you have experienced and recovered from failure. There are also some open-ended questions, such as "Who do you respect the most?" The essence is to observe values and ways of thinking.
Notably, the two rounds of interviews were almost all behavioral-focused and did not include a lot of technical questions. This shows that for some positions, Goldman Sachs pays more attention to soft skills - especially expression ability, judgment and cooperation awareness.
You can write it, but you may not be able to pass all tests.
We have long been focusing on OA and technical written examinations for large manufacturers Practical guidance , covering mainstream evaluation platforms such as HackerRank, CodeSignal, and Niuke.com.
The focus of the service is not on "the number of questions", but on the dismantling of problem-solving ideas, time allocation strategies, reminders of error-prone points, and support for multi-language implementation ideas in real OA scenarios to help candidates perform stably in a high-pressure evaluation environment and pass test cases as completely as possible.
For students who are exposed to OA from major manufacturers for the first time or who have been stuck in the evaluation stage many times, this kind of technical support that is close to the real process is often more efficient and controllable than simple self-study.
