A recruiter reached out to me and kept checking whether I minded being in the office 5 days a week (I told them several times that Amazon is 5 days too, so I'm hardly in a position to mind).
First there was a 40 minute screening: write 2 SQL queries and fix a Java Spring API (I honestly could not figure out why the last two tests were failing). Camera on and screen recording the whole time. I looked down to think for a moment and got a warning, which scared me, but after I explained it to the recruiter it was fine.
Phone screen 1: the team's TL asked me a huge pile of questions about everything, all rapid fire (was he worried I was using AI to cheat?), but the bulk of it was PostgreSQL and message queue questions.
Phone screen 2: a senior on the team gave me a tree problem. It didn't feel like a known question. Looking back I think it was a variant of 958? A BFS solution is very little code, but he asked a lot of follow-ups and kept steering toward B-trees, so we were back to databases again. Then lots of questions about adding indexes to a DB. The most speechless moment was when he asked why not just add an index to every column, bruh.
Finally the onsite. For what it's worth, the Goldman office next to the World Trade Center is really impressive, and the ceilings above the desks are super high so it doesn't feel oppressive.
The first round was a bit weird. They said they would send me a CodePad link, then I waited 5 minutes with no message and the interviewer just walked in with paper and a pen... wow, literally handwriting the code? (Afterwards I wondered if that was on purpose, because too many people cheat?) But I never cheat, so honestly writing by hand was no pressure. The problem was the most common one in Goldman interview reports, the highest average score problem. But there were a lot of follow-ups: what if it doesn't fit in RAM, what about negative numbers, what about integer overflow, how to handle it with multiple threads, explain what atomic means, explain the difference between synchronized and ReentrantLock, and I ended up changing the original solution a lot.
Second round: a warm-up with 252, then 253, but he explicitly said I couldn't use the sweep line approach, so I used a heap, and he didn't say anything about that and asked about complexity in detail. Midway he asked what I would do if I couldn't use sort(). I roughly hand-wrote the idea of quickselect, and he asked how to pick the pivot, plus the usual what if the input is a stream, and so on. At the end he said to assume the arrays are not time intervals but logs. I didn't know what he was getting at, but I think he wanted me to go toward how a Kafka broker works (log append).
Third round: design a dashboard, but we basically drew nothing, we just talked. There was hardly any structure and I didn't know what the interviewer wanted to hear, so I just talked it through using my own experience. It touched on range queries, using temporal for a dashboard, and how watermarks work. This round was short, the TL seemed to have something come up, and it was over in 20 minutes.
Fourth round: the skip-level manager came in and said roughly that you need a commit mindset: it's fine if you don't know something because you can learn it, but being lazy and doing nothing is absolutely not okay. What was I supposed to say to that, I buttered him up a bit and agreed. Then I went through a project I did at Amazon. He basically never let me talk about the technical side for more than 2 sentences, and mostly asked how I handle PMs and EMs, how I follow up on SLAs, and so on.
Half an hour after I walked out, the recruiter told me they had a verbal offer. I said I'd think about it. My Amazon stock cliffed, so the TC isn't that different, but Goldman hasn't had layoffs as brutal as my current company. We'll see. Posting the write-up first.
Discussion
Loading comments…