GOLDMAN SACHS · SYSTEM DESIGN

Goldman Sachs system design interview questions

Analyst Superdays usually include an LLD round on classes, schema and concurrency. Associate and VP loops add HLD on finance-flavoured or high-throughput systems plus a resume deep dive. SQL and schema questions show up across levels.

From public candidate reports and Goldman Sachs's careers pages, checked November 2026. Processes vary by team. AlgoRung is not affiliated with Goldman Sachs.

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Which levels get a design round

Level	Goldman Sachs title	Design round	Low-level design
SDE 1	Analyst	Usually not	Yes
SDE 2	Analyst (2–3 years) to Associate	Yes	Yes
Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3)	Associate to Vice President	Yes	Yes
Staff Software Engineer	Vice President / Managing Director	Yes	Yes

Design questions candidates report

Real-time trade processing system

Design the payment service behind an online store, where the hard part is never charging twice and never losing money. Requirements and scale, the payments API and data model, then the hard parts: idempotency keys end to end, the payment state machine, unknown outcomes after timeouts and webhooks, a double-entry ledger, daily reconciliation with the provider, tokenization to stay out of card data, and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Payment system
Flash-sale backend under heavy load

Design a sale where ten thousand phones go on sale at noon and ten million people click at once. Requirements and a burst of millions of requests a second, the claim API and data model, why one inventory row melts, then the hard parts: a filtering funnel at the edge, atomic stock claims in Redis with split buckets, asynchronous order creation through a queue, payment windows that return stock and reconciliation.
Full walkthrough: Flash sale
Notification system

How to design a shared notification service that any team can call: one API for push, SMS, email and in-app, user preferences and quiet hours, templates, separate priority queues so a marketing blast never delays a login code, per-provider rate limits, retries with backoff, deduplication, dead device tokens, bulk campaign fan-out and delivery tracking.
Full walkthrough: Notification system
Task scheduler with dependencies and priorities (LLD)

How to design a shared scheduler that runs millions of one-off and cron jobs on time: a jobs table indexed by next run time, partitioned schedulers that claim due work with leases, a unique run key so each tick fires once, a queue and worker pool with heartbeats, retries, timeouts and fencing tokens, and the midnight thundering herd, priorities and per-team quotas.
Full walkthrough: Job scheduler

Also reported

Distributed message queue
Key-value map with per-entry TTL
Banking system with accounts and cards (LLD + SQL)

How to answer any design question: the LADDER method · How the design round is scored by level · Low-level design and machine coding

Questions people ask

When does Goldman Sachs ask system design?

A design round is part of the loop for SDE 1 (Analyst), SDE 2 (Analyst (2–3 years) to Associate), Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) (Associate to Vice President), Staff Software Engineer (Vice President / Managing Director). Analyst Superdays usually include an LLD round on classes, schema and concurrency. Associate and VP loops add HLD on finance-flavoured or high-throughput systems plus a resume deep dive. SQL and schema questions show up across levels.

What system design questions does Goldman Sachs ask?

Candidates report: Real-time trade processing system; Flash-sale backend under heavy load; Notification system; Task scheduler with dependencies and priorities (LLD); Distributed message queue; Key-value map with per-entry TTL.

System design questions at other companies

System design questions across all companies · Behavioral questions