Ramp·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jul 2026
System design round at Ramp for a software engineer role. The question was a full hotel reservation aggregator design, Expedia-style, and it went deep fast. Lots of back and forth on caching strategy and consistency trade-offs.
- Design a hotel reservation aggregator like Expedia that searches for and books rooms across multiple hotel chains in real time.
- Should you call upstream hotel APIs on every search request, cache availability data, or pre-allocate a block of inventory in advance? Walk through the trade-offs.
- When your pre-allocated room pool runs out, do you make a live API call to the hotel or block the request and wait for a refill? How does each choice affect tail latency?
- How would you design the cache invalidation and refresh strategy for room availability, and how do you partition that data across hotels, regions, and dates?
“This one spiraled in a good way.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Ramp, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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