Goldman Sachs Engineering Manager Interview Questions

1.Walk me through how you've developed a direct report who was struggling with technical leadership. What specific skills did you focus on and how did you measure progress?

2.Tell me about a process or technology you championed that initially met resistance from your team. How did you drive adoption and what did you learn?

3.Tell me about a time you had to get multiple engineering teams to work together on a shared deadline when each team had competing priorities. What was your approach?

4.Tell me about a time you had to tell a key stakeholder that your team couldn't deliver what you'd committed to. How did you handle that conversation?

5.Describe a technical decision you made as a manager that turned out to be wrong. How did you recognize the mistake and what did you change in your decision-making process?

6.Describe a situation where you had to coordinate engineering work across multiple business lines at your company. What challenges did you face and how did you address them?

7.You need to deploy a new microservice to our Kubernetes cluster that handles sensitive client data. What security and compliance considerations would you implement in your deployment pipeline?

8.Our Transaction Banking platform processes $2 trillion in payments annually. You're tasked with migrating one of the core payment processing services from our on-prem infrastructure to AWS while maintaining zero downtime. What's your migration strategy?

9.You're leading the team that maintains our kdb+ time-series database storing 10 years of market data. A trader reports that historical volatility calculations are taking 30 seconds instead of the usual 2 seconds. Walk me through your investigation approach.

10.A product manager wants to add a new analytics dashboard to Marquee that requires joining trade data with reference data across our Oracle and kdb+ systems. The join involves 500M trades and takes 2 hours. How do you approach this?

11.Our Marcus platform needs to process loan approvals in real-time while maintaining strict regulatory compliance. How would you architect a system that can handle 50,000 loan applications per day with sub-second response times while ensuring every decision is auditable?

12.Your team is building a new risk calculation engine that needs to aggregate positions across 200+ trading books in real-time. Each book has different data schemas and update frequencies. How do you design this system?

13.We're building a new client notification system for Marquee that needs to alert institutional investors about market events, research updates, and trade confirmations. How would you design this system to handle 50,000 clients with varying subscription preferences?

14.Marcus by Goldman Sachs needs a new fraud detection system that can evaluate personal loan applications in real-time. The system must process 10,000 applications daily while maintaining regulatory explainability requirements. Walk me through your design.

15.Your team needs to build a cross-asset position aggregation service for our risk systems that consolidates positions from 500+ trading books across equities, fixed income, and derivatives. Each book updates at different frequencies and has varying latency requirements. How do you approach this?

16.We're building a new research distribution platform that needs to deliver Goldman's equity research reports to 10,000+ institutional clients globally. The system must handle embargoed content, client entitlement management, and regulatory restrictions by jurisdiction. Design this system.

17.Goldman's trading floors generate 500TB of market data daily across our global offices. We need to build a new data lake architecture that can ingest this data in real-time while supporting both low-latency trading queries and batch analytics for risk management. How do you design this system?

18.We're building a new trade settlement system for our prime brokerage business that needs to process 1 million trades daily across multiple asset classes and handle settlement with 200+ custodian banks globally. The system must guarantee no settlement breaks while supporting same-day settlement cycles. Design this architecture.

19.Tell me about a time you had to make a critical technical decision while partnering with quantitative researchers or traders. How did you balance their requirements with engineering constraints?

20.Describe a time when you had to coach a senior engineer who was technically excellent but struggled with Goldman's apprenticeship culture. How did you approach this?

21.Walk me through a time when you had to deliver a major technical change that impacted how other teams accessed your system's APIs or data. How did you manage that rollout?

22.Tell me about the most complex ethical or compliance decision you've faced as a leader. How did you work through it and what was the outcome?

23.Describe a time when you had to convince a partner or MD to change their technical approach based on your team's engineering judgment. What was your strategy?

24.Tell me about a time when you had to make a major architectural decision under significant time pressure that would affect client-facing systems. How did you balance speed with quality?

25.We're launching a new wealth management portal for our private wealth clients who each have portfolios worth $10M+. Estimate how much revenue we'd lose if our system went down for 2 hours during market hours.

26.Marcus has 13 million customers but our mobile app's session timeout is causing authentication friction. How would you estimate the revenue impact of extending the timeout from 15 minutes to 45 minutes?

27.Our Marquee platform serves 5,000 institutional clients globally. You need to estimate the infrastructure cost impact of adding real-time ESG scoring to all equity research reports. Walk me through your analysis.

28.Goldman processes $10 trillion in transactions annually across all business lines. Estimate how much we could save in infrastructure costs by optimizing our database queries to reduce average query time by 20ms.

29.Our prime brokerage clients want to access their portfolio analytics through APIs instead of our current web portal. Estimate the engineering effort and timeline to build this capability for 500 institutional clients with $2 trillion in assets under custody.

30.We're considering migrating our equity derivatives pricing models from our on-premise grid to AWS. The models price 500,000 derivatives daily and require 10,000 CPU cores during peak hours. Estimate the total cost of migration including opportunity costs.