Goldman Sachs Associate Interview Questions and Answers

Credit Default Swaps (CDS) provide risk management and investment opportunities by allowing parties to hedge against credit risk.

• Risk Management: CDS allow investors to hedge against the risk of default on debt instruments.

• Speculation: Investors can use CDS to speculate on the creditworthiness of a borrower, potentially profiting from changes in credit spreads.

• Liquidity: CDS markets can provide liquidity for inves...read more

Use a hashmap to store the frequency of each character and then iterate through the string to find the first non-repeating character.

• Create a hashmap to store the frequency of each character in the string.

• Iterate through the string and update the frequency in the hashmap.

• Iterate through the string again and return the first character with frequency 1.

Trapping rainwater involves calculating the volume of water that can be held between elevations in a landscape.

• Use two-pointer technique to traverse the height array from both ends.

• Calculate trapped water at each index based on the minimum of the maximum heights to the left and right.

• Example: For heights [0,1,0,2,1,0,1,3,2,1,2,1], the trapped water is 6 units.

• Consider edge cases like flat surfaces or descending he...read more

Design a distributed rate limiter for managing incoming requests.

• Use a distributed key-value store like Redis to store request counts and timestamps.

• Implement a token bucket algorithm to control the rate of incoming requests.

• Use a distributed messaging system like Kafka for communication between rate limiter instances.

• Consider using consistent hashing to evenly distribute requests among rate limiter instances.

To improve model performance beyond hyperopt, consider ensemble methods, feature engineering, and data augmentation.

• Implement ensemble methods like bagging, boosting, or stacking to combine multiple models.

• Perform feature engineering to create new informative features or transform existing ones.

• Apply data augmentation techniques to increase the size and diversity of the training data.

• Consider using advanced algori...read more

The gas and track problem involves determining the amount of gas required to complete a track.

• Calculate the distance of the track

• Determine the fuel efficiency of the vehicle

• Divide the distance by the fuel efficiency to get the required amount of gas