Rapido — Lead Professional | Interview Experience
Summary
I completed five interview rounds over 28 days for the Lead Professional I role at Rapido and was selected.
Full Experience
Rapido - Lead Professional I | Interview Experience
Company: Rapido Role: Lead Professional I Experience: 8+ Year Location: Bangalore Interview Type: All Virtual round one CTO(HM) round onsite Overall Process: Very Aligned (approx 1 month)
Round 1 - [HR Screening]
Duration: [10 mins]
Questions asked:
- Past experience discussion
- Situational question discussion
Result: [Shortlisted for Further Round]
Round 2 - [Technical Round with DOE (Director of Engineering)]
Duration: [1 hour]
Question: [Reverse System Design]
Discussion:
- Discussion on past projects
- Architectural discussion on those, why you choose this.
- How you would protect service from unfair usage, multitenancy asked
- Asked to tell how you will implement token bucket algorithm in prod
- Kafka indepth discussion
- Trade-offs
Interviewer focus: Past project and if you chosen some tech need justification for that and what can be done better and implementation detail on whiteboard
Result: [Shortlisted for Next Round]
Round 3 - [System Design]
Duration: [60 mins]
Design a Personalized Search Recommendation System for Rapido
Design a system that recommends the top 3 destinations when a user starts searching for a ride. The recommendations should be personalized based on the user’s historical behavior, including day of week, time of day, frequency, recency, and favorite destinations. Favorite destinations should receive a higher priority while still considering contextual relevance. For example, if “Office” is a favorite and the user frequently travels there on weekday mornings, it should rank highly on Monday morning. The system should support low-latency recommendations, handle cold-start users, adapt to changing user behavior, and scale to millions of users.
Discussion:
- HLD
- Trade off choosing a tech
- Domain separation
- Scalability
Round 4 - Hiring Manager (CTO)
Duration: [60 mins] - Onsite
Questions:
- Why Rapido?
- Why are you looking for a change?
- System design discussion on driver-rider matching, with extensive deep-dives and grilling.
- What excites you and keeps you motivated every day?
My experience: This was the most grilled interview, he was expecting a good engineer and was also looking leadership quality.
Round 5 - HR (30 min virtual)
Questions:
- General QA first Then, situational and behavioral questions to assess how you handle different scenarios.
Overall Experience
The interview process was 5 rounds and took approximately 28 days.
Difficulty: Medium-hard
Topics to prepare:
- System Design
- Distributed Systems
- Kafka
- Databases
- Leadership
Outcome: Selected
Hope this helps others preparing for the Rapido Lead Professional I role. Good luck!
Interview Questions (3)
Personalized Search Recommendation System
Design a system that recommends the top 3 destinations when a user starts searching for a ride. The recommendations should be personalized based on the user’s historical behavior, including day of week, time of day, frequency, recency, and favorite destinations. Favorite destinations should receive a higher priority while still considering contextual relevance. For example, if “Office” is a favorite and the user frequently travels there on weekday mornings, it should rank highly on Monday morning. The system should support low-latency recommendations, handle cold-start users, adapt to changing user behavior, and scale to millions of users.
Implement Token Bucket Algorithm
Explain how you would implement a token bucket rate limiting algorithm in production, including considerations for distributed environments.
Driver-Rider Matching System Design
Design a system for matching drivers and riders, covering architecture, scalability, and handling edge cases.