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Rippling interview notes, page 7 of 13

Large Enterprises

Most of these Rippling write-ups come from Software Engineers (126), then Machine Learning Engineers (2). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (60), the system design round (48), the hiring manager screen (5) and the onsite coding round (5).

128 interview notes · updated Sep 2026

Rippling·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Rippling SWE interview with a tree/graph problem that sounds deceptively clean but has some real nuance once you get into the greedy logic. One coding round, algorithmic focus.
  • Given a company org tree rooted at the CEO, find the minimum number of employees you need to 'promote' (i.e. reassign to report directly to the CEO) so that no employee's path to the CEO exceeds a given length h.

“The setup clicked pretty fast but the greedy part took me a minute.”

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Rippling·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
System design round at Rippling for an MLE role, focused entirely on building out the recommendation and trending pipeline for a news product. Pretty deep dive, no fluff questions, just one long technical problem that kept branching.
  • Design the recommendation and trending pipeline for a Google News-style product. Assume article data and user interactions are already available. Cover personalization features, the recommendation architecture, and how trending is computed and served at low latency.

“This one is deceptively broad.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Rippling had me do an object-oriented design problem centered on poker hand comparison. Not the usual LeetCode grind, which I appreciated, but it still caught me off guard in terms of scope.
  • Design a poker hand comparator: given two hands of cards, determine which hand wins. If both hands are the same type (e.g. flush, full house, three-of-a-kind), break the tie by comparing the relevant card values.

“I spent the first few minutes just trying to nail down the ranking of hand types before touching any code.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Rippling system design round for a software engineering role. The question was about extending an expense-approval rule engine to handle group-level rules, no coding needed, just talking through the design. Pretty conceptually dense for a single question.
  • You have an expense-approval rule engine where each rule applies to a single expense. How would you extend it to support group rules, ones that operate over a set of expenses (e.g. total monthly travel spend across a team, or max 5 expenses per employee per day)? Walk through group key design, stateful aggregation, evaluation timing, and how group rules interact with individual rule decisions.

“This one took me a minute to even figure out where to start.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
System design round at Rippling for a software engineer role. The main problem was designing a news aggregation feed, which sounds straightforward until you get to the clustering part and realize there's a lot of moving pieces to coordinate.
  • Design a large-scale news aggregation system where articles from many sources get grouped into story clusters, and users see a single feed entry per story rather than duplicate articles from different publishers.
  • How would you build a personalization layer on top of the story feed, factoring in user interest profiles, source preferences, and a mix of freshness, relevance, and source diversity in the ranking?

“I started with ingestion and APIs which felt safe, but the clustering part is where I slowed down.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Rippling system design round focused on building a news feed at massive scale. The whole thing centered on read/write paths, per-user read tracking, and layered caching. Pretty intense scope for a single session.
  • Design a simplified news feed application for a very large user base. Cover per-user read status tracking, feed generation, storage design, and caching strategies including CDN, edge caching, and hot-article caches.

“This one sprawled fast.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Rippling SWE interview round where the coding portion was AI-assisted, meaning you could use any tool you wanted but had to talk through your thinking the whole time before letting the AI actually write anything. The question itself was a known problem circulating on forums, but the real variable was the interviewer since follow-ups differed a lot depending on who you got.
  • Design a system to calculate and distribute salary payments for delivery workers, including your choice of data structures and overall approach.

“The twist here is you spend most of the interview just talking.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Rippling SWE interview with a delivery cost calculation problem. Pretty standard coding round but there were a few design decisions that came up mid-question that I wasn't fully expecting.
  • Design a delivery cost calculator with methods to add a driver (each with their own hourly rate), record a delivery with a start and end time, and compute the total cost across all deliveries.

“The core logic isn't that bad but I got tripped up when they asked how I'd handle the time inputs.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Interviewed at Rippling for a software engineering role and got a system design question I'd actually prepped for. Walked through it fine, the interviewer seemed engaged, still got rejected, which was frustrating.
  • Design a system to aggregate ad events at scale.

“I had actually prepped this one pretty thoroughly and felt decent walking through the flow.”

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Rippling·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Short behavioral block at Rippling for a software engineer role, maybe 10 minutes total. Nothing too intense, but the scope creep question tripped me up more than I expected.
  • Tell me about a time you dealt with scope creep on a project.

“I had a story ready but it came out kind of muddled.”

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