In 2026 expect prompts on real-time position and risk aggregation across trading desks, an order-management system that routes trades and handles partial fills and cancellations, and tick-level market-data storage optimised for backtesting reads. Interviewers probe consistency of aggregated state under high message rates, event ordering, and time-series read optimisation. Generic web-scale answers miss the mark; the bar is precise reasoning about correctness, latency, and the write-versus-read trade-off in a trading context. Grounding your design in real financial workflows is what separates strong candidates.
About Goldman Sachs
Top-tier global investment bank; large engineering org; Bengaluru is one of the largest engineering centers globally.
- Competitors
- Morgan Stanley · JP Morgan · Citi · BarCap (Barclays)
Goldman Sachs recruitment process
01
Online coding assessment (HackerRank)
02
Technical coding round on DSA
03
System-design round on a trading or risk service
04
Hiring-manager and Superday rounds, then offer
What to expect in each round
01
Round 1 (60-90 min)
online coding assessment.
02
Round 2 (45-60 min)
coding round on data structures and algorithms.
03
Round 3 (45-60 min)
system-design round on trading, risk, or market data.
04
Round 4 (45 min)
behavioral and hiring-manager round.
System Design questions Goldman Sachs asked
Sourced from 2+ candidate post-mortems. Hit Practice to answer any one with AI voice feedback.
- 01
Hard
Design a system to predict same-day delivery feasibility for a new pincode in tier-3 India.
- 02
Hard
We're seeing UPI failure rates spike at 9pm on weekends. How would you debug, and what's your hypothesis?
- 03
Hard
Walk me through how you'd build idempotency into a payment retry system. What happens if the network drops mid-callback?
- 04
Hard
Design Swiggy Genie's matching algorithm. How does it differ from food-order matching?
- 05
Hard
Walk me through how you'd architect transaction-level fraud detection for 100M daily UPI transactions.
- 06
Medium
How would you build a recommendation engine that suggests bills the user is about to forget?
- 07
Medium
Design a cashback-allocation system that prevents abuse without alienating genuine users.
- 08
Hard
Design a system to detect duplicate documents at web scale. What's your approximation strategy?
- 09
Hard
Design Amazon Prime's recommendation engine. How would you handle the cold-start for a new Prime member?
- 10
Medium
Design a URL shortener like bit.ly. Walk me through database choice and scaling.
- 11
Hard
Design Instagram's news feed ranking. How do you handle a celebrity who posts 50 times an hour?
- 12
Hard
Design Amazon's order tracking notification system. Optimise for cost at 100M orders/day.