SDE 2 at Rippling

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Round by round

1. 1

   Technical Screening60 min

   I had the privilege of interviewing for an SDE 2 position at Rippling, and I'm happy to share the experience here. From the start to the final offer, the process was challenging yet insightful. I’m excited to walk you through each round and the lessons I learned along the way. The first round was a technical screening that tested both coding skills and system design understanding. Problem: Delivery Cost Tracking System The interviewer split the problem into three parts, which allowed me to demonstrate my problem-solving process.

   • Cost Calculation: The task was to track delivery costs using three methods: add_driver, add_delivery, and get_total_cost().
   • Payment Tracking: This involved methods like pay_up_to_time() and get_cost_to_be_paid().
   • Analytics: I had to implement a function get_max_active_drivers_in_last_24_hours(). While I didn’t fully implement the solution, we discussed my approach, data structures, and time complexity. The interviewer seemed satisfied with my thought process, even though time didn’t allow me to complete everything.
2. 2

   Coding + System Design60 min

   In the onsite round, I was given a system design problem combined with a coding challenge. It was all about scalability and data handling. Problem: Music Analytics System

   • Most Played Songs by Unique Users: Implement methods like add_song(), play_song(), and print_analytics().
   • Recently Played Unique Songs: Implement print_recently_played() for a user, with the option to print k most recent songs. I used hashmaps for tracking user-song data and explained how I’d optimize for performance and scalability in a production environment.
3. 3

   Hiring Manager Round45 min

   This was a more relaxed, conversational round that focused on my experience and cultural fit at Rippling. The HR team shared some prep questions ahead of time, which helped guide the conversation. We discussed one of my main projects in detail, including challenges, decisions, and trade-offs I made. I enjoyed this round because it allowed me to reflect on my growth and the impact of my work.

4. 4

   Technical Round60 min

   The third round focused on coding business logic problems and dynamic rule validation. Problem: Validate Business Rules on Expenses

   • I was tasked with designing a rules engine to validate business rules like maximum expenses, seller types, and restrictions on expense categories. We discussed how to model these rules dynamically and validate them against real-world data. The round tested my ability to break down complex business logic and translate it into working code.
5. 5

   System Design60 min

   The final technical round was a system design challenge, which focused on building a scalable, efficient architecture. Problem: Design a Google News-like Aggregator We discussed the end-to-end architecture for building a news aggregator system:

   • Crawling: How to fetch and aggregate news articles.
   • Indexing: Designing the database and search system.
   • Ranking: Discussing how to rank articles based on relevance and timeliness.
   • Scalability: How to ensure the system could handle large amounts of traffic and data. The round tested my ability to think about scalability and efficiency from a high-level architectural perspective.

What came up