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Design several backend components

Last updated: Mar 29, 2026

Quick Overview

This set of prompts evaluates backend system design, API and data-modeling skills, low-level software architecture, and competencies in consistency, concurrency, scalability, extensibility, and auditability.

  • hard
  • Rippling
  • Software Engineering Fundamentals
  • Software Engineer

Design several backend components

Company: Rippling

Role: Software Engineer

Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: HR Screen

The interview note also referenced several low-level design and backend design questions. For each prompt, define the core APIs, data model, major classes or services, edge cases, and how you would make the design extensible. 1. **Build an expense rules engine** Design a service that evaluates employee expense claims against configurable business rules. A rule may depend on fields such as employee level, country, department, expense category, merchant type, amount, currency, and date. The engine should return decisions such as `approve`, `reject`, or `manual_review`, along with explanations showing which rules fired. 2. **Design a web API for an article voting system** Design backend APIs for upvoting and downvoting articles. A user should have at most one active vote per article, should be able to change or remove a vote, and article scores should be queryable efficiently. Discuss idempotency, authentication, hot articles, and consistency of vote counters. 3. **Design a music player** Design the object model and major components for a music player that supports tracks, playlists, a play queue, play/pause/next/previous, shuffle, repeat modes, and playback state. Focus on clean abstractions and extensibility. 4. **Design a food delivery billing system** Design the billing component for a food delivery app. Given an order, compute the full price breakdown including item totals, taxes, delivery fee, service fee, surge pricing, promotions or coupons, tips, and refunds or adjustments. The system should be auditable and deterministic. 5. **Design a key-value store** Design a key-value store supporting at least `put`, `get`, and `delete`. Discuss optional features such as TTL expiration, prefix scans, persistence, concurrency, and scaling from a single process to a distributed service.

Quick Answer: This set of prompts evaluates backend system design, API and data-modeling skills, low-level software architecture, and competencies in consistency, concurrency, scalability, extensibility, and auditability.

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Rippling
Feb 12, 2026, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
HR Screen
Software Engineering Fundamentals
3
0
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The interview note also referenced several low-level design and backend design questions. For each prompt, define the core APIs, data model, major classes or services, edge cases, and how you would make the design extensible.

  1. Build an expense rules engine
    Design a service that evaluates employee expense claims against configurable business rules. A rule may depend on fields such as employee level, country, department, expense category, merchant type, amount, currency, and date. The engine should return decisions such as approve , reject , or manual_review , along with explanations showing which rules fired.
  2. Design a web API for an article voting system
    Design backend APIs for upvoting and downvoting articles. A user should have at most one active vote per article, should be able to change or remove a vote, and article scores should be queryable efficiently. Discuss idempotency, authentication, hot articles, and consistency of vote counters.
  3. Design a music player
    Design the object model and major components for a music player that supports tracks, playlists, a play queue, play/pause/next/previous, shuffle, repeat modes, and playback state. Focus on clean abstractions and extensibility.
  4. Design a food delivery billing system
    Design the billing component for a food delivery app. Given an order, compute the full price breakdown including item totals, taxes, delivery fee, service fee, surge pricing, promotions or coupons, tips, and refunds or adjustments. The system should be auditable and deterministic.
  5. Design a key-value store
    Design a key-value store supporting at least put , get , and delete . Discuss optional features such as TTL expiration, prefix scans, persistence, concurrency, and scaling from a single process to a distributed service.

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