Rippling Software Engineer Interview

This is your first interaction with Rippling's hiring team—which is a recruiter who will introduce you to Rippling, giving you an overview of the company's mission, culture, and values. They'll walk you through the interview process, explaining what each stage entails and what to expect.

If you don't have a referral, the recruiter might ask you some basic behavioural questions to get a sense of your work style and personality. So, an example question could be, “tell me about your most challenging project”.

Important Note: Here, it's crucial that you don't disclose your salary expectations or reveal where you stand in the interview process with other companies during. This ensures that both parties focus on assessing your fit for the role and company culture without external influences.

This stage typically lasts for about an hour and is held on a platform called CodePair, where you can code and collaborate in real-time.

The interviewer will assess your problem-solving skills, coding ability, and approach to tackling technical problems..Expect coding questions similar to those found on LeetCode, such as manipulating and traversing arrays, string manipulation, operations on linked lists, implementing sorting algorithms like merge sort or solving search problems like binary search.

Make sure you are prepared to explain your thought process and reasoning behind the solutions you propose.

During this round, you'll typically meet with a hiring manager to further assess your fit for the team and the role. Most hiring managers kick off by discussing your professional background and your experiences. So, they might ask about your previous roles, the projects you've worked on, and so on.

Some hiring managers might also ask you to present a specific project you've worked on. This could be a project from a previous job, a personal project, or an academic project—you'll likely be given advance notice.

Regardless of the format, it's important to be prepared to discuss your experiences in detail, including the workflows and processes you followed, your contributions to the project, any challenges you faced, and how you overcame them.

Towards the end of this round, you'll have the opportunity to ask any questions you want—about the company culture, projects you'll be working on, etc.

This round typically takes place onsite at Rippling's office or remotely via video conferencing. It consists of 3-4 interviews:

1. Coding Round I: During this interview, you'll either use your Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with screen sharing or CodePair. The 90-minute session comprises two parts:
2. In the first part, you'll be asked to build something practical, such as a simple HTTP server or REST APIs.
3. In the second part, you'll discuss what you built, your approach, any challenges faced, and how you would improve or scale it.

This interview is hands-on and practical, focusing on your ability to write clean, functional code and solve real-world problems.

1. Coding Round II: The second coding round, if included, will also take place in CodePair. It lasts for 1 hour and typically features LeetCode-style coding questions that build on each other. For example, you might be asked to design a data structure that supports operations like inserting objects, retrieving objects, and calculating the average of all objects within a given time.
2. System Design: In this hour-long round, you will be assessed on your ability to design scalable systems that tackle real-world problems. Rippling uses different tools for this interview, such as whiteboarding, paper sketches, or collaborative online platforms. The system design interview is often used for levelling; so as to determine if you're suitable for more senior or specialised roles within the organisation. You could be asked to design something like a URL shortening service or a file-sharing system. You should be able to weigh the pros and cons of different design approaches and explain your decisions. They'll throw a lot of questions at you about scaling. Beyond that, be prepared to discuss performance optimization, reliability, and potential challenges.

In the last leg of the onsite interview series, you can expect a behavioural interview with either a manager or Software Engineer at Rippling. Be ready to share instances illustrating how you embody Rippling's values and what skillsets make you a great fit for their company culture. For instance, you can talk about a time when you spearheaded a team through a significant project or embraced a risk to explore new avenues, even if it resulted in failure.

We'd recommend practising this interview with a mock interviewer. There are several software engineers at Rippling who provide great practice and guidance on dealing with the twists and turns this interview can take — and you can book a slot with them on Prepfully.

1. Design the Quora feed page.
2. Design a system that processes jobs from a database in an exactly-once fashion.
3. Given an array of integer numbers and an integer target, return the indices of the two numbers that add up to the target.
4. Determine whether an integer is a palindrome. An integer is a palindrome when it reads the same backward as forward.
5. Given a 32-bit signed integer, reverse the digits of the integer.
6. You are given a continuous stream of integers as input. Design an algorithm to process each integer and maintain the last k integers in memory. At any given point, your task is to find and output the smallest difference pair among the last k integers.
7. Design a chat application like Slack.
8. Design a social media platform like Twitter.
9. Design a recommendation system for an e-commerce website like Amazon.
10. Can you tell me about a time when you had to resolve a conflict within a team?
11. Describe a situation where you had to adapt to a sudden change in project requirements.
12. Can you talk about a mistake you made and how you learned from it?