Rippling interview process (2026)
Round-by-round breakdown of the Rippling software engineering interview across 3 levels and 17 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.
SDE Intern (6-month / Summer; campus + off-campus; India drives often a combined intern+FTE offer)
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: ~1–3 weeks · Recommended prep: 6–10 weeks
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Round 0: Online Coding Assessment
Assessment · ~60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment · HackerRank
Sample question: Jump Game VI (maximum sum reaching the end, jump up to k) — Given an array of N integers and an integer k, start at index 0 and reach index n-1. From index i you may jump to any index in [i+1, i+k]. Your total is the sum of the values of every index you land on (including index 0 and index n-1). Maximize that total.
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Round 1: Technical Interview 1 (DSA / Coding)
Onsite · ~45–60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Maximum Points You Can Obtain from Cards (remove k from either end) — Given an array of N integers and an integer k, in each of k steps remove one element from either the front or the back of the array. Maximize the sum of the k removed elements.
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Round 2: Technical Interview 2 (Hard DSA or OOD/LLD Design)
Onsite · ~60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Design an LFU cache with LRU tie-breaking — Design and implement a Least-Frequently-Used (LFU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1). On capacity overflow evict the least-frequently-used key; break ties by evicting the least-recently-used among the minimum-frequency keys. Discuss the class structure (key->node map, freq->doubly-linked-list map, minFreq pointer).
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Round 3: Hiring Manager / Behavioral Round
Behavioral · ~30–45 minutes · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
Software Engineer (SDE-1 / new grad L5 / SWE II) — Bengaluru
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~22 days · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months
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Round 0: Recruiter Screen
Phone · 15-30 min
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank)
Assessment · ~60-90 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Median of Two Sorted Arrays — Given two sorted arrays nums1 and nums2 of sizes m and n, return the median of the combined sorted array in O(log(m+n)) time. If m+n is odd the median is the middle element; if even it is the average of the two middle elements. Either array (but not both) may be empty.
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Round 2: Technical Phone Screen / DSA (CodePair)
Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
Sample question: In-Memory Key-Value Store with Transactions (BEGIN / COMMIT / ROLLBACK, nested) — Implement an in-memory key-value store supporting SET k v, GET k (print value or NULL), and DELETE k. Add transaction support: BEGIN opens a transaction; COMMIT applies all changes since the matching BEGIN; ROLLBACK discards them. Transactions must nest, and ROLLBACK reverts only the innermost open transaction.
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Round 3: Hiring Manager Round
Behavioral · 45-60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
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Round 4: Onsite — Machine Coding / LLD Build (Coding #1)
Onsite · ~90 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Design an In-Memory File System (LLD) — Machine-coding round: design and implement an in-memory file system supporting mkdir(path), addContent(path, content), readContent(path), ls(path) (list children of a directory, sorted), and delete(path). Model directories and files as a tree, handle nested paths, and keep the code runnable and testable as you extend it under follow-ups.
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Round 5: Onsite — System Design / HLD
System_design · ~60-75 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a Resource Manager (LLD) — Low-level design round: implement a Resource Manager that can addResource, removeResource, and allocate/release resources efficiently under concurrent-style access, exposing clean OOP interfaces. Follow-ups extend it toward quotas and lookups. Evaluated on modular design, correctness, and iterating under new requirements.
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Round 6: Onsite — DSA / Coding #2
Onsite · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Find Bounding Boxes of Connected Houses (Grid Connected Components) — Given an R x C grid of 0s (empty) and 1s (a house), group houses into connected components using 4-directional adjacency. Output the number of components, then for each component its axis-aligned bounding box as minRow minCol maxRow maxCol, in the order the components are first discovered scanning top-to-bottom, left-to-right.
Senior Software Engineer — Bengaluru
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~3-6 weeks · Recommended prep: 4-8 weeks · Cooldown: ~6 months
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Round 0: Recruiter Screen
Phone · 15-30 min
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
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Round 1: Technical Screen / DSA + LLD (CodePair)
Phone · ~60 min · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
Sample question: Design a News Aggregator / Personalized Feed (Google-News-like) — System-design round: design a news aggregation and personalized feed service. Cover ingestion of many publisher sources, deduplication/clustering of the same story, ranking/personalization, feed fan-out and delivery, caching, and freshness. Move quickly through requirements to data model and APIs, then scale to high read volume and discuss tradeoffs.
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Round 2: Hiring Manager Round
Behavioral · 45-60 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
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Round 3: Onsite — Machine Coding / LLD Build
Onsite · ~90 min · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Design a Global Payroll Processing System — System-design round: design infrastructure to run payroll for millions of employees across many countries/currencies. Cover the pipeline (gross-to-net calculation, tax/deduction rules per jurisdiction, idempotent payment disbursement), correctness/auditability, exactly-once semantics and duplicate-payment prevention, batch vs. streaming, and scaling for month-end spikes.
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Round 4: Onsite — System Design / HLD
System_design · ~60-75 min · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a Generic Booking / Reservation System — System-design round: design a generic booking system (e.g. hotel/resource reservations, Expedia-like). Cover the API and data model for availability, holds vs. confirmed bookings, avoiding double-booking under concurrency, cancellation/refunds, and scaling reads. Discuss consistency vs. availability tradeoffs and how you'd shard/cache inventory.
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Round 5: Onsite — DSA / Coding
Onsite · ~45-60 min · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Delivery / Courier Cost Tracking Service — Build a service for a delivery company. Given a set of drivers each with an hourly pay rate, and a stream of completed deliveries (driverId, durationMinutes), compute the total amount owed to each driver and the combined total across all drivers. Partial hours are paid pro-rata. Follow-ups typically extend it with payment/unpaid tracking and peak-concurrency queries, so design clean, extensible classes rather than a one-off script.
Other companies' interview processes
Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.