Mentorship Guided
Questions Curated by Industry Mentors
Verified by working professionals at top finance, product, and service firms
JP Morgan Chase
Technology Analyst — Finance
Technical + Finance
- Rate-limiting system for a high-frequency trading API handling 1M+ requests/second.
- Difference between stock, bond, and derivative — model their pricing.
- Payment clearing system consistency across distributed nodes.
- Idempotent transaction API to prevent double debits.
- Data structures for a real-time order book with time complexity justification.
Goldman Sachs
Technology Analyst
DSA + Quant
- Detect anomalous price spikes in a trade data stream without storing full history.
- LRU cache with O(1) get/put extended to handle TTL expiry.
- Mark-to-market accounting and its effect on daily balance sheets.
- Maximum profit from at most two stock transactions; extend to k transactions.
- Portfolio risk aggregation system for 50,000 assets with live feeds.
Morgan Stanley
Software Engineer
System Design
- Order book matching engine for an equity exchange with sub-millisecond latency.
- Distributed lock in a multi-region financial system.
- CAP theorem — where does a core banking system sit on the spectrum?
- Concurrency issues in a multi-threaded trade execution engine.
- Reconciliation service that verifies trade records between two systems nightly.
Citibank
Technology Associate
HR + Behavioral
- Identify and resolve a critical production bug under time pressure.
- Resolving architectural disagreement between two senior engineers.
- Balancing technical debt against tight delivery timelines.
- Discovering a potential compliance risk during a code review.
- Learning a new technology quickly to meet a project requirement.
Amazon
SDE-1 / SDE-2
DSA + Leadership Principles
- Design Amazon's product recommendation engine at scale.
- Serialize and deserialize a binary tree.
- Tell me about a time you disagreed with a manager. (LP: Have Backbone)
- Find the kth largest element in an unsorted array.
- Design a URL shortener like bit.ly with analytics.
TCS
Digital / Ninja Track
Aptitude + Technical
- SOLID principles — violating and correcting Single Responsibility.
- Describe a team situation where your communication resolved a conflict.
- Difference between TCP and UDP — when to use each.
- Normalisation in DBMS up to 3NF with examples.
- Reverse a linked list iteratively and recursively.