Rippling Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Onsite Rounds and the Fastest Feedback I've Seen

I'm giving back to the forum. It took me 6 months of searching, but I finally landed an offer. I have 3 years of experience and interviewed for an SDE II role.

Recruiter
Pretty standard: why are you looking for a new opportunity, why Rippling, an introduction to the company, and then questions about sponsorship needs.

Coding
For the coding round, you can choose to use AI or write the code by hand. I wasn't sure exactly what "using AI" in the interview would look like, so I went with handwritten. It was a question that had already been posted on the forum. After implementing the basic requirements, I fully wrote out both follow-ups.

Onsite
The onsite was three rounds total:

Coding - Again, you could choose AI, but I went with handwritten. Also a question that had already been posted on the forum — a Rule Engine problem. Note that you need to write it in an OOP style, you can't hardcode things. My approach was a DSL (similar to SQL, defining various Operators/Conditions/Filters, etc.).

System Design - I designed a newsfeed system, similar to Google News:

• How to pull from multiple sources (the ingestion part)
• Fan-out-on-read vs. fan-out-on-write
• Users can customize which topics and sources they like — what happens by default when no topic is selected (mixing various pre-computed news from cache)
• Handling breaking news — it should always show up on everyone's homepage

Project Presentation - You make a 2-3 slide deck and talk through a project. It doesn't have to be your hardest project — pick the one where you had the most ownership, the most impact, and the most trade-offs to talk about. Along the way there were some behavioral questions, like how you schedule timelines/priorities, handle conflicts, and think about trade-offs.

This company has a bad reputation on the forum, but the interview process and experience turned out to be one of the best out of the dozens of companies I've interviewed with. It was also super fast, with super quick feedback — honestly hard to believe in this market.