Goldman Sachs Senior Analyst Developer Interview

Interviewed Jan 2010 in Jersey City, NJ (took 6 weeks)

The process basically entailed two phone interviews and two 4-6 hour in person interviews. The first phone interview was a very basic technical assessment where a guy was asking me about my experience, why I wanted to work for Goldman and in finance, and some basic Java questions. In *every single interview* I was asked "Why Goldman?" and "Why finance?" (I come from a non-finance background).

The second phone interview was more of a soft skills interview, where they asked about interpersonal skills. They asked me things like, "Can you explain a situation in which something went wrong on a project you were working on, and what you personally could have done better to prevent it from happening?" For most of these it's important to admit some amount of guilt, but nothing egregious, and explain how you learned from the experience and how you'd handle it now.

The first set of on-site interviews were four different 1-on-1 interviews. Three were technical and one was with a business analyst. The technical questions were relatively harmless -- Java questions from the very basics (talking about the collections framework etc.) to multi-threading, to some details about how hash tables work, to Java garbage collection, etc. Database questions about how indexing works, the datastructures used in indexing, basic SQL questions, etc. One guy grilled me pretty hard on past work experience, so be careful to know how to explain the items on your resume in a reasonable degree of detail.

The second set of on-site interviews was four more 1-on-1 interviews. Two were with managers and one was a technical VP who grilled me in more detail on technical things (mainly multi-threading, database transaction theory, and agile vs. waterfall methodologies). The last one was with the tech recruiting head.