just finished the full Goldman Sachs software engineer interview process and wanted to write up exactly what happened while it's fresh. applied through their careers portal, heard back in about 10 days.
the sequence was: recruiter screen (30 min) hirevue video interview online assessment (hackerrank, 2 coding problems) final round: 4 back-to-back 45-min panels (2 coding, 1 system design, 1 behavioral)
online assessment. two problems in 90 minutes. difficulty was medium-hard leetcode range. one was a graph traversal variant, the other was a DP problem that I initially misread. HackerVue proctors you, so lock your door and don't mutter at the screen like I did.
coding panels. both interviewers had different styles. one walked through the problem with me collaboratively, asked follow-ups on complexity. the other was quiet and let me drive. both used a shared Google doc, no IDE. they do NOT accept pseudocode as a final answer, they want runnable-ish code with edge cases addressed.
system design. this was the meatiest round. see my other post on this specifically. short version: distributed, latency-sensitive, finance context matters.
behavioral. more on that separately too. Goldman is genuinely heavy on this compared to other banks I've done.
total time from first contact to final round: 6 weeks. debrief came 5 business days after the final day. leveling offer came with the offer letter.
if you're targeting Goldman for a software engineering role, the biggest thing I'd say: their behavioral bar is higher than what you'd prep for at a typical FAANG. they care about client focus and integrity in a way that actually shows up in questions.