Rippling

Role: SDE2 (escalated to SDE3)

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: September 1, 2024

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Rejected (Secured "Hire" in 4 out of 5 rounds, but final round was "No Hire")

Difficulty: Medium-Hard

Rounds: 5 rounds

Topics Asked: Coding, Project Deep Dive, System Design (HLD), Low-Level Design (LLD)

Experience:

The interview process for this SDE role at Rippling involved five distinct rounds.

1. Screening Technical Round:
This round began with an introduction to the candidate's background, followed by a coding challenge. The problem was "to determine whether a series of currency exchanges could be converted into a profitable exchange cycle, essentially checking for arbitrage opportunities."

2. Hiring Manager Round:
This round focused on the candidate's experience, particularly their work at Groww. The candidate discussed the end-to-end process of implementing a UPI-based payment system, including challenges in security, scalability, and real-time processing. The hiring manager was impressed, leading to an escalation of the candidate's profile from SDE2 to SDE3.

3. System Design Round (HLD):
The candidate was asked to design a news aggregator system, which functions as a crawler to fetch news articles from various sources, index them, and make them searchable.

4. Coding Round:
Details of the specific coding question are not provided, but it was a dedicated coding round.

5. Design Round (LLD):
In the final round, the candidate was asked to "design and implement a key-value store using Java." The interviewer clarified it was a low-level design question. The candidate explained core components like data storage, concurrency control, and persistence. Despite a comprehensive design and implementation, the round resulted in a "No Hire" decision, possibly due to the sudden nature of a follow-up question and interpersonal dynamics.

Final Outcome: While the candidate secured a "Hire" verdict in four out of five rounds, the final design round resulted in a "No Hire" decision, leading to overall rejection.