Rippling Interviews

My interview experience at Rippling for the SDE-1 position was both challenging and enlightening. I started with the first round, which focused on Data Structures & Algorithms. The first question required me to calculate the total duration to complete all tasks and determine the order of task execution given two 2D lists representing tasks and their dependencies. The second question was similar to LeetCode 1136 - Parallel Courses, which I had encountered before but needed to apply my knowledge in a slightly different context.

For the second round, I was tasked with designing an Employee Access Management System. The problem required implementing several methods to manage access types for employees across various resources. This round tested my understanding of object-oriented design and system architecture, as I had to ensure that the methods handled multiple access types and efficiently retrieved access information.

Overall, the interview process was thorough and provided a good balance between theoretical knowledge and practical problem-solving. I felt confident in my preparation and was happy to receive an offer after successfully completing both rounds.

I applied for the Staff Engineer position at Rippling through a referral. With 10 years of experience, I was invited for Round 1, which focused on High-Level Design (HLD).

The interview involved designing a new aggregator app with personalised feeds based on user interest and liking of publication house.

My proposed solution involved polling APIs of all subscription houses and storing feeds in an RDS database, considering a low volume of 5 million writes per day.

For reads, which had a requirement of 100k QPS, I suggested caching the top 100 feeds per category and publication house. User feeds would then be generated on the fly when a request came in. Since all these components would be in Redis, I expected feed generation to be very fast. I also suggested pre-generating feeds and caching them in Redis.

At the end, I felt the interview went pretty well, but I did not hear back from the recruiter, so I am assuming I was rejected. Some feedback from the recruiter would have been appreciated.

My algorithmic programming round at Rippling for a Senior Software Engineer position began with a discussion about AI tooling, which felt more like an opt-in despite initial communications suggesting liberty to use it. I chose to opt-out. The interview question required me to design and implement a Delivery Tracking System, including methods such as addDelivery, addDriver, and payUpToTime. A critical constraint involved handling cost precision at 1-second intervals. I found the problem quite straightforward and managed to complete the core implementation within 35 minutes, following a brief introductory chat and project discussion.

The interviewer then spent some time validating my solution with his own test cases. For simplicity, I had opted to use double for cost calculations, a decision I explicitly mentioned and the interviewer seemed to accept. However, my solution exhibited some rounding errors, which the interviewer noted, attributing them to the use of double. Despite this, he generally found the solution acceptable. I received a rejection email three days later. I believe the rejection was primarily due to these precision errors, or perhaps the interview concluded without me having an opportunity to refine the error handling.

I recently interviewed for a Senior SDE position at Rippling. The interview process was structured into several rounds:

System Design

• Searching for rooms by date and location.
• Reserving rooms.
• Ingesting room availability from third-party hotels.

Web Question

Coding

• Add a song.
• Play a song by a user.
• Print analytics based on the number of times a song was played, ordered by the descending number of unique users.
• Retrieve the 3 most recent unique songs played by a user.

I interviewed at Rippling for a Senior Software Engineer role with 7+ years of experience, primarily gained in startups. The process comprised five rounds.

Round 1: Delivery Cost Tracking System

This round focused on designing and implementing a delivery cost tracking system. It felt like a standard Rippling question, and I believe I performed well, even tackling the additional complexities. The verdict was 'Strong Hire'.

Round 2: Manager Round

For the manager round, I prepared a detailed PowerPoint presentation showcasing my most challenging project. The manager didn't delve much into technical specifics, mainly asking about SLAs and task division. I received another 'Strong Hire' verdict.

Onsites

Round 3: Rule Evaluator

The first onsite round involved designing and coding a rule evaluator. This was another common Rippling problem. I chose C++ and ended up writing a substantial amount of OOP code. In hindsight, I should have tested my code more frequently midway through the process. While I completed the implementation, there were some errors I needed to debug. This round resulted in a 'Lean Hire'.

Round 4: Design Booking System

This was a System Design round where I was asked to design a booking system. I frankly admit I was unprepared for High-Level Design rounds, having focused on Google interviews just two days prior. The interviewers expected a very thorough, complete answer and didn't engage in the collaborative discussion style I'd experienced at Google. I felt I absolutely bombed this round, receiving a 'No Hire'.

Round 5: Design Stack Overflow APIs

The final round involved designing Stack Overflow APIs. I didn't feel extensive preparation was needed here, as it primarily involved standard follow-up questions on scalability and security. I performed well, getting a 'Hire to Strong Hire' verdict.

Given my poor performance in the System Design round, I decided not to follow up with my recruiter for feedback and received a rejection email two days later. The recruiters were genuinely nice, probably the best I've encountered.

I interviewed for an SDE-2 position at Rippling. My journey to this interview was a bit unique: initially, I was referred for an SDE-2 role, then my profile was considered for SDE-1 after an online assessment and a recruiter call, but ultimately, they decided to consider me for SDE-2 again. The phone screening focused on a problem that required me to implement a service for managing delivery costs.

In the first part, I designed and coded a service with addDriver, addDelivery, and getTotalCost methods, ensuring getTotalCost was optimized. I precomputed the total cost upon adding deliveries, and my solution passed all custom test cases.

For the second part, I extended the service to include payUpToTime and getCostToBePaid functionalities. I approached this by using a global priority queue where time was represented as epochs, along with the estimated cost, to manage payments and remaining costs. This approach also worked as expected with the interviewer's test cases.

During my interview for the SDE2 role at Rippling, I was presented with a comprehensive coding and system design challenge. The core task was to build a robust system for a food delivery company to manage its delivery drivers and calculate their earnings. I first had to implement functions to add drivers with their hourly rates, record delivery start and end times, and then aggregate the total cost of all deliveries for a live dashboard. This initial phase heavily emphasized good OOP practices and efficient data storage for time-based data. Subsequently, the problem evolved, requiring me to add functionalities for payment tracking. This involved implementing a payUpTo function to mark deliveries as paid based on a specific time and a getTotalCostUnpaid function to report outstanding payments. The problem statement explicitly mentioned that the solution did not need to be thread-safe, allowing me to focus on the core logic and data structures.

I appeared for Rippling's SDE I hiring process.

Round 1 - Online Assessment

2 LC medium-hard quesitons were asked on HackerRank with a time limit of 1 hour. I do not remember the exact questions, but they were oriented towards hard side. Q1 was solved within 20-25 mins, but Q2 had multiple failing test cases due to incorrect approach. I applied a less known approach and was able to pass all test cases.

After few weeks of the OA, I got call from the recruiter. They were asking to appear for an onsite interview the next day. They also discussed about current compensation, notice period and the standard behavioural questions.

The interviews had 2 rounds - DSA & LLD, both on the same day.

Round 2.1 - Onsite Interview 1 (DSA)

In the first onsite round, question was around Median of 2 Sorted Arays. I was able to implement the brute force and then optimal solution but the interviewer wanted something more optimized - even more optimized than a O(log (n)) solution. Got a not so well feedback here.

Round 2.2 - Onsite Interview 2 (LLD)

In the second onsite round, I was asked to implement an Employee Access Management system, and 3 functionalities - grant, revoke and get. I had to ensure I cover all the use cases and present an optimized solution. The interviewer looked quite happy with my solution.

Shortly, they reached out to have another DSA round because the first one did not go well. So another DSA round was scheduled the next day.

Round 2.3 - Onsite Interview 3 (DSA)

I was given 2 arrays - managers and reportees where managers[i] was the manager of reportee[i] with the constraint 1 <= managers[i], reportees[i] <= n. CEO or head of the company was always represented with 1. I had to find the level of the fartheset employee from the CEO. So, I had to basically find the height of the org tree. I did it within 30 mins. All the test cases given by the interviewer passed. They looked pretty satisfied.

Then came a follow-up question - the CEO wants the org tree not to go beyond a height h for organizational efficiency i.e any employee beyond a level h would report directly to the CEO and the subordinates in that subtree would remain as in the original tree. I had to implement this optimally such that the number of reportees to the CEO remain minimized, while also keeping the overall height within h.

Within the time left, I had to discuss and implement the solution. I was able to implement a greedy approach and the interviewer looked pretty happy and I hoped for a positive feedback.

Final Result - Rejected

Still wondering why :(

Years of Experience: 10 years
Previous Companies: Top-tier startups and product-based enterprise companies

Interview Experience Summary

1. Coding Round 1 (60 mins)

   Problem focused on Travel Expense Calculation
   Included a follow-up problem
   Emphasis on strong OOP principles and clean code practices

   ✅ Verdict: Strong Yes

2. Engineering Manager Round (60 mins)

   Deep dive into latest project and system-level thinking
   Covered behavioral questions aligned with Rippling Leadership Principles

   ✅ Verdict: Strong Yes

3. Coding Round 2 (60 mins)

   Problem related to Driver Delivery Service
   Included 2 follow-up scenarios
   Focus on best coding practices, OOP, time complexity, and alternative solutions

   ✅ Verdict: Strong Yes

4. System Design Round (60 mins)

   Design problem: News Feed Service
   Discussed fault tolerance, consistency vs availability, monitoring strategies, and scalability

   ✅ Verdict: Yes

5. Machine Coding Round (90 mins)

   Task: Web API design
   Follow-up discussions on security, design decisions, concurrency, testing strategies, and production readiness

   ✅ Verdict: Strong Yes

🔹 Rippling Interview Experience – Software Engineer

Total Exp: 4+ Years

📌 Round 1: Technical Screening (Coding + System Design Flavor)

Problem: Build a delivery cost tracking system
Asked in 3 parts:

1. Cost Calculation
   

   add_driver(driverId)
   add_delivery(driverId, startTime, endTime)
   get_total_cost()

   Discussed approach, data structures, and time complexity before coding.
2. Payment Tracking
   

   pay_up_to_time(upToTime)
   get_cost_to_be_paid()

3. Analytics
   

   get_max_active_drivers_in_last_24_hours(currentTime)

   Didn’t implement fully due to time, but the approach was discussed and accepted.

📌 Onsite Round 1: Coding + System Design

Problem: Music Analytics System

1. Most Played Songs by Unique Users
   

   add_song(songId)
   play_song(userId, songId)
   print_analytics()

2. Recently Played Unique Songs
   

   print_recently_played(userId)
   print_recently_played(userId, k)

📌 Onsite Round 2: Hiring Manager Round

Behavioral + Project discussion
HR shared prep questions. Discussed one main project in detail.

📌 Onsite Round 3: Coding + Rules Engine

Problem: Validate business rules on expenses
Rules like max total amount, seller type limits, expense type restrictions
Discussed how to model rules dynamically and validate them against expenses.

📌 Onsite Round 4: System Design

Problem: Design a Google News-like aggregator
Talked about crawling, indexing, ranking, and scalability.

Final Verdict: Offer (Verbal confirmation from HR after a few days)

Got this question in Coderpair round:

We have a list of expense and rules. Aim is to validate rules for each expense.

Each expense is similar to

{ 
	expenseid: "1"
	itemId: "Item1"
	expensetype: "Food"
	amountInUsd : "250"
	sellerType : "restaurant"
	SellerName "ABC restaurant"

}

- Total expense should not be > 175
- Seller type restaurant should not have expense more that 45
- Entertainment expense type should not be charged

evaluateRule(List<rule> , List<expense>)

I was reached out by a recruiter on LinkedIn with an opportunity with Rippling. I had a discussion over Zoom with her. I got my screening / Technical Interview discussion scheduled after almost a week.

Recruiter had mentioned that I am free to use AI (ChatGPT, Copilot etc) in this round, but I need to tell that to the panelist. The evaluation criteria will be defined accordingly. If I choose not to use, the criteria will be different.

Technical Screening Round

The interview asked me the below question Part 1 Given a list of some drivers and the deliveries they are making, need to write a code to compute the total cost of all deliveries. It needed to have 3 methods

1. add driver(driverId)
2. add deliveries(startTime, endTime)
3. getTotalCost() getTotalCost was needed in optimised time, which I provided by computing cost at the time of adding the delivery - interviewer had agreed to this approach.

I explained the approach and solved by defining 3 classes Driver, Delivery and the main service. The panelist tested it against his test cases and got the expected results.

I had asked for the evaluation criteria to which the interviewer had said let's solve the question as much as possible

Part 2 Add two more functionalities

1. payUpToTime(upToTime) -> settle the delivery cost up to this time
2. getCostToBePaid() -> get the remaining delivery costs left after settling the payment Discussed the approach for this in O(n), he wanted more optimal solution. Discussed approach for production env based on events to trigger completion and keeping a track of completed deliveries. Then to be paid is as simple as paid minus total cost (from part 1) Agreed on the approach, wrote the code, tested it against interviewer's test cases - worked as expected

Part 3 Implement a method to provide simultaneous deliveries across drivers. He was only expecting the approach. Discussed by sorting and then checking the overlaps. Seemed satisfied and we closed the discussion.

I did all of this without using any chatgpt or copilot.

Received the email from recruiter on the next working day of rejection :| No reasons, no feedback. What were they expecting, god knows. When I replied back to the recruiter seeking feedback - she mentioned, she is yet to receive detailed feedback and haven't heard back since then.

Anyways, giving back to the community in case it helps anyone.

I had my interview process with Rippling in January 2025 after applying online and being contacted by a recruiter. The recruiter was helpful, providing clear expectations for each round.

Round 1: Phone Screening

I was told to expect a base problem and then scale it up, along with discussing an approach for a third scale-up. The base problem involved calculating total payments for delivery drivers given their hourly rates and delivery logs. I approached this by designing a class with functions to add drivers and rates, log deliveries (using epoch seconds), and calculate the total amount due. For the first scale-up, I had to consider clearing payments at a specific time and returning the total unpaid amount, for which I discussed an approach. I don't recall the third scale-up problem, but I only needed to outline my approach for it.

Managerial Round

This round was largely behavioral. I discussed my past experiences, projects, and general work. We also touched upon my roles as a mentor and mentee, as well as aspects of my work I'd like to change versus what's currently working well. Interestingly, the recruiter provided a script beforehand, so I mostly focused on preparing my answers.

Onsite Rounds

System Design

The challenge was to design a system for Rippling's customers to upload documents for internal audit review, with each document having a defined review completion time. I found myself getting bogged down with 'nice-to-have' features, and the interviewer had to guide me away from these tangents. I believe I focused too much on non-essential functional requirements.

Coding Round 1

The base problem involved processing a list of songs and user plays to return songs ordered by the descending count of unique users who played them. For the scale-up, I needed to return the top 3 most recently played songs per user. We had a discussion about the time complexity implications if the number '3' was arbitrary. Overall, I feel I struggled significantly with the clarity of my code in this round.

Coding Round 2 was never scheduled as I did not advance past the previous rounds.

Given my performance, particularly my coding clarity issues and getting sidetracked in system design, I wasn't surprised that I didn't receive an offer. I believe I performed poorly.

My interview journey for an L6 role at Rippling consisted of five distinct rounds, culminating in a rejection.

Round 1 - DSA

This round involved designing a Music Player similar to Spotify. The core methods to implement were addSong, playSong, and printMostPlayedSongs, which required tracking unique user plays. The follow-up extended this to retrieving the getLastThreeSongs played by a specific user. There was another follow-up mentioned by the recruiter post-interview, but I didn't get time to address it during the session.

Round 2 - Hiring Manager

This round focused entirely on general behavioral questions, assessing my fit and experience.

The next 3 rounds happened in the office.

Round 3 - DSA

The challenge here was to design a Key Value Store. I had to implement get, set, and deleteKey methods. The first follow-up introduced support for transactions (begin, commit, and rollback). I immediately clarified if nested transactions were required, and the interviewer confirmed they would be for a subsequent follow-up. I spent a considerable amount of time implementing the single-level transaction support. The second follow-up was to support nested transactions, but unfortunately, time ran out before I could tackle it.

Round 4 - DSA

This round focused on designing an Excel sheet. I needed to implement set (handling cell names like A1 and values including simple numbers or formulas like "=9+10"), reset, and print (showing both raw and computed values). The follow-up extended the set functionality to support values that referenced other cells, such as "=A1+10".

Round 5 - System Design

The final round was a system design interview where I was tasked with designing Google News.

I recently interviewed for a Staff Software Engineer (SSE) position at Rippling. My interview consisted of one Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA) round, which was conducted via a Hackerrank codepair link. The round started with brief introductions from both my interviewer and myself.

The primary task was to implement three APIs for a delivery system application. The core requirement was that a delivery driver has an hourly rate for performing deliveries. I was asked to implement the following three APIs:

• addDriver(driverId: integer, hourlyRate: float)
• addOrder(driverId, startTime, endTime): I also had to mention my choice of data type for time and justify it.
• getTotalCost() for all the deliveries.

I found the initial question straightforward.

There were also follow-up questions:

• "What is the issue with using float and double as data types for currency, and what data type should you use instead?"
• "What changes would you make in the code if we wanted to update the hourly rate of a driver?"

I felt optimistic about this round because I was able to write production-level code, handling concurrency and other best practices, and I answered all the follow-up questions effectively.

Despite my performance, I was ultimately rejected. The recruiter mentioned that I had only solved one out of the three required questions. They stated that for the other two questions, at least the approach needed to be discussed. I had specifically asked the interviewer about the time limit and the number of questions at the beginning. The interviewer responded casually, advising me to proceed at my normal speed and ensure the code was production-level. I believe that if the interviewer had set clearer expectations, I would have planned my execution strategy differently.

I wanted to share my interview experience at Rippling, as I found LeetCode very helpful in my preparation.

Screening Rounds:

• Round 1 (Hire): Design Excel Sheet
  This round involved a coding challenge to design an Excel sheet with sum formula functionality.
• Round 2 (Hire): Past Projects and Experiences
  This was a behavioral round where I discussed my past projects, how I approached them, and my leadership experiences.

On-Site Rounds:

• Round 1 (Strong Hire): Design In-memory Key-Value Store
  I was tasked with designing an in-memory key-value store, including transaction capabilities.
• Round 2 (Lean - Hire): Design News Aggregator and Feed System
  This round focused on designing a news aggregator and feed system. The interviewer seemed a bit challenging, starting questions before I fully grasped the scope, which made it a tough luck experience.
• Round 3 (Hire): Design Stack Overflow API End-to-End
  This was a 1 hour 30 minute round, split into two 45-minute segments. The goal was to code a working and production-ready end-to-end API, similar to Stack Overflow's functionality, within each 45-minute slot.

After the interviews, HR reached out and informed me that I was down-leveled to an SDE-2 designation, which I attributed to the system design interview where I struggled. Since I was specifically looking for SDE-3 or higher positions, I declined the offer.