Rubrik interview process (2026)

Round-by-round breakdown of the Rubrik software engineering interview across 3 levels and 20 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.

Rubrik salary & ratings · All interview processes

Software Engineer / SDE Intern (Winter/Summer 'industrial' internship, Bangalore)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: 3-5 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12+ weeks of focused DSA/CP prep. Rubr

  1. Round 0: Application / Resume + Eligibility Screen

    Other · N/A · difficulty 1/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank)

    Assessment · 90 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Scramble String — Two strings s1 and s2 of equal length are given. s2 is a scramble of s1 if it can be produced by recursively partitioning s1 into two non-empty substrings and optionally swapping them, applying the same rule to each part. Given s1 and s2 (read from stdin as the first two whitespace-separated tokens), print 'true' if s2 is a scramble of s1, otherwise 'false'.

  3. Round 2: Technical Interview Round 1 (Coderpad/Zoom)

    Onsite · 45 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: King's Health (minimum stabs to reduce N to zero) — The king starts with integer health N. In one stab you may either (1) decrease the health by 1, or (2) if the current health h is composite, replace it with its largest proper divisor. Read N from stdin and print the minimum number of stabs needed to bring the health to 0.

  4. Round 3: Technical Interview Round 2 (Coderpad/Zoom)

    Onsite · 45 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Make B equal to A in minimum move-to-end operations — You are given two arrays A and B, each a permutation of the same n distinct integers. In one operation you may remove any element from B and reinsert it at the front or the back of B. Find the minimum number of operations to turn B into A. Input: first line n, second line the n elements of A, third line the n elements of B. Print the minimum number of operations. (Answer = n minus the length of the longest subsequence of B whose values form a contiguous, increasing block of positions in A.)

  5. Round 4: Hiring Manager Round

    Behavioral · ~30 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

  6. Round 5: Offer

    Offer · N/A

    Mode of interview: Offer discussion

Member of Technical Staff (MTS) / Software Engineer — Bengaluru (new-grad & early-career, 0-2 yrs)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~2-4 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-12 month

  1. Round 0: Recruiter screen (off-campus path only)

    Phone · ~20-30 minutes · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: Online Assessment (HackerRank) — campus/new-grad only

    Assessment · ~100 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Online assessment

    Sample question: Job Scheduler with Dependencies (Course Schedule II) — You are given N jobs (0..N-1) and a list of dependency edges a->b meaning job a must finish before job b can start. Produce a valid execution order that runs every job after all its parents complete, or report that no order exists (a cycle). Return the lexicographically smallest valid order.

  3. Round 2: System coding screen (concurrency)

    Phone · ~45-75 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Bounded Blocking Queue (Producer-Consumer) — Implement a thread-safe bounded blocking queue with a fixed capacity: enqueue(x) blocks while the queue is full, dequeue() blocks while it is empty. Multiple producers/consumers may call concurrently. (Rubrik's variant: debug/complete a buggy producer-consumer that lacks synchronization.) Demonstrate FIFO correctness with a producer thread and a consumer thread. NOTE: distinct from the senior no-dynamic-allocation static ring buffer - here a dynamically-sized queue with blocking semantics.

  4. Round 3: DSA / problem-solving screen

    Phone · ~60-90 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Min Absolute Difference in Last K Stream Elements — Numbers arrive one at a time as a stream. After each arrival, report the minimum absolute difference between any two elements among the most recent K elements (the sliding window of the last min(count,K) values). If fewer than 2 elements are in the window, report -1.

  5. Round 4: Onsite: System coding (deep concurrency)

    Onsite · ~45-75 minutes · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Design Two Queues in One Fixed-Size Array — Given one fixed-size array of capacity C, implement two independent FIFO queues that share that storage with no dynamic allocation. Support enqueue(q, x) and dequeue(q) for q in {1,2}; report FULL when a queue can take no more, EMPTY when a dequeue has nothing to return.

  6. Round 5: Onsite: Systems/distributed-flavored DSA

    Onsite · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Merge Changed Memory Blocks (Merge Intervals) — A backup tracker records changed byte ranges as intervals, e.g. [1,2],[3,4],[6,9],[10,12]. Merge all overlapping AND contiguous (touching) ranges into the minimal set of disjoint ranges - here the answer is [1,4],[6,12] because byte 2 and byte 3 are adjacent. Output the merged ranges sorted by start.

  7. Round 6: Onsite: System / low-level design

    System_design · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design and Implement a Linux-style File System — Design an in-memory file system supporting mkdir, create/write/read files, ls (list directory contents sorted), and path resolution. Discuss the on-disk layout: inodes vs. directory entries, how blocks map to files, how you'd support large files (direct/indirect block pointers), and how metadata (permissions, timestamps) is stored. Extend to concurrent access.

  8. Round 7: Engineering director + manager discussions

    Behavioral · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

Senior MTS / Senior Software Engineer / SDE-2 — Bengaluru (experienced, ~2-6+ yrs)

Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: ~1 month · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: No official policy; no Rubrik-confirmed reapplication figure

  1. Round 0: Recruiter screen

    Phone · ~20-30 minutes · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

  2. Round 1: System coding screen (concurrency)

    Phone · ~45-75 minutes · difficulty 4/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Unisex-Bathroom Synchronization (Democrats vs Republicans) — A single shared resource (one bathroom) may be occupied by several people of the SAME party at once, but must never hold members of both parties (Democrats and Republicans) simultaneously. Given a sequence of people, each arriving on their own thread, admit them under a monitor that enforces this mutual-exclusion-between-parties invariant without deadlock or starvation. Prove the invariant never breaks.

  3. Round 2: DSA / problem-solving screen

    Phone · ~45-90 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round

    Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview

    Sample question: Fixed-Size FIFO Ring Buffer, No Dynamic Allocation, Thread-Safe — Implement a fixed-capacity FIFO queue backed by a statically-sized array (a ring buffer) with NO dynamic memory allocation. Provide put(x) (blocks while full) and get() (blocks while empty), correct under concurrent producers and consumers using only a mutex and condition variables. NOTE: distinct from the new-grad bounded blocking queue - here the buffer is a compile-time-fixed static ring with zero allocation.

  4. Round 3: Onsite: Deep system coding (concurrency & distributed)

    Onsite · ~45-75 minutes · difficulty 4/5

    Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview

    Sample question: Rank of Element in a Stream (Count of Smaller Numbers After Self) — Given an array, for each element output how many elements to its right are strictly smaller than it (equivalently, maintain the rank of each newly inserted element in a running stream). Solve better than O(n^2) using a Binary Indexed Tree over compressed coordinates. Interviewers often ask you to hand-roll the ordered structure rather than use STL.

  5. Round 4: Onsite: System design (LLD, +HLD for senior)

    System_design · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5

    Mode of interview: Live system design interview

    Sample question: Design an FTP / Rsync-like Chunk-Based File Transfer System — Design a system that transfers large files/backups between machines like FTP/rsync. Focus on Rubrik's core philosophies: fault tolerance (resume after failure, checksums per chunk), performance (parallel chunk transfer, delta/rolling-hash dedup so only changed chunks move), and correctness. Cover chunking strategy, the rolling-checksum diff algorithm, retry/idempotency, ordering and reassembly, and bandwidth/backpressure control.

  6. Round 5: Engineering director + manager discussions

    Behavioral · ~45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5

    Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview

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Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.