Rubrik

Large Enterprises

Rubrik is a cloud data management and cybersecurity company that provides data backup, recovery, and protection solutions with a focus on ransomware resilience and data security. It is known for its Zero Trust Data Security platform and is a publicly traded company serving enterprise customers.

5 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Rubrik·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Rubrik software engineer interview with a tree BFS validation problem. The question was more involved than it looked and I spent way too long second-guessing my approach before landing on something reasonable.

You're given an undirected tree as an edge list and a set of queries, each query being a permutation of all node labels. For each query, determine whether that permutation could be a valid BFS traversal output of the tree, given that neighbors can be enqueued in any order.

“My first instinct was to just simulate BFS for each query and check, which works but blows up when q is large.”

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Rubrik·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Rubrik SWE interview with a graph problem that looks deceptively clean on the surface. The core challenge is building an interval overlap graph and finding its largest connected component efficiently, and they want O(n log n) so brute force is off the table.

Given n people each with a work interval [start, end], define a graph where two people are connected if their intervals overlap. Find the size of the largest connected component in this graph. Solution should run in O(n log n).

“My first instinct was union-find, which is right, but the part I fumbled was figuring out how to avoid the O(n^2) edge enumeration.”

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Rubrik·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Rubrik SWE interview with a camera-on coding round. One problem, pretty involved, and I'm still not 100% sure I nailed the edge cases. The constraint about every suffix having balanced character frequencies is the kind of thing that sounds manageable until you actually try to build a valid arrangement.

Given a string S and an integer K, determine whether you can rearrange the characters of S such that for every suffix of the rearranged string, the frequency difference between any two distinct characters in S is at most K. If a valid rearrangement exists, return the lexicographically smallest one; otherwise return -1.

“The suffix constraint is what makes this nasty.”

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Rubrik·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Rubrik SWE interview with a graph/interval grouping problem that looks straightforward until you realize the transitive connectivity part is the whole point. Decent problem, made me think harder than expected about sweep-based approaches.

Given N people each with a time interval [start, end], two people are connected if their intervals overlap. Connectivity is transitive, so if A overlaps B and B overlaps C, they're all in the same group even if A and C don't overlap directly. Find the size of the largest such group.

“My first instinct was to just sort by start time and do a linear scan, which works for merging intervals but I kept second-guessing whether it was enough for the transitive part.”

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Rubrik·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Rubrik SWE interview with a tree + BFS validation problem. The question sounds deceptively straightforward but there's a decent amount of edge-case thinking involved once you actually sit with it.

You're given two equal-length arrays that together define a tree by pairing nodes as edges, where earlier indices imply higher hierarchy. Given a list of nodes as a candidate BFS traversal, determine whether it's a valid BFS traversal of that tree.

“The tree construction part tripped me up first.”

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