Rippling Engineering Manager Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 11 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Rippling.
Rippling
Software Engineering Manager
Manager Average Negative experience No offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Phone screen Technical screen Onsite Background check Offer
Interview formats
Technical System Design Behavioral
The recruiter reached out to me to set up an interview. I agreed, and we had a recruiter phone screen, which went well and confirmed remote work was an option. The next step was a system design interview with a stressed-out software engineer. After passing that, I was told a more senior recruiter would take over. However, the company's own system sent an automated message about the next step being an interview with the hiring manager, which conflicted with what the recruiter said. The recruiter apologized, blaming bugs in their own system, and had to repeat many questions due to this disorganization. Later, I was informed that the remote option was no longer available. A few weeks passed before the hiring manager finally contacted me about an interview. The whole experience was very disorganized and made the company look bad.
Confirmed questions1 question
- Can you design a system?
Rippling
Engineering Manager
Senior Difficult Positive experience Accept offer 7 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Technical screen Technical screen Technical screen Presentation Technical screen Technical screen
Interview formats
Behavioral System Design Technical Coding Presentation
So, the interview process overall was good. It kicked off with a recruiter chat where they went into detail about the company and were super helpful throughout. The interviews themselves were deep, technical, and interactive. It was initially a 6-round loop, but they added an extra coding round because of some perceived gap. After the interviews, the recruiter actually scheduled a 15-minute call to get my feedback on the process, which was a first for me! I also appreciated the offer rollout; the recruiter, HRBP head, and director were all on a call to walk through the offer and answer questions. Plus, the VP called to congratulate me and address any concerns. The actual interview rounds were: Exploratory call, System design and technical architecture (twice), LLD/Coding, Tech Product Partnership, Engineering Management fundamentals, and a final Coding round.
Confirmed questions8 questions
- What is your role, team structure, working philosophy, and approach to building and managing your team (handling high and low performers)? The interviewer also shared insights on working culture, vision, growth, product, challenges, and the role.
- Could you design a system to aggregate news from various channels, enabling user login and subscription to categories, while considering legal, compliance, functional, and non-functional aspects? Key considerations include database choices, schema, fault tolerance, celebrity use cases, and optimizing read/write operations, filtering, and transformation.
- Design a fault-tolerant, scalable, highly available, low-latency system to ingest and process events (like user clicks) from mobile and other devices, and support queries for historical click counts per hour over the last 24 hours.
Rippling
Engineering Manager
Manager Average Neutral experience No offer 5 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Onsite Panel Technical screen
Interview formats
Behavioral System Design Coding
The initial HR call was great and helped me understand the role which helped expedite the process. The HM round was superb as it helped me paint the overall picture of the company and culture. Both the system design rounds were great again as they were conversational and touched various aspects of scale. I think I did a pretty good job here! The people centric round was also very organic and articulate. Had a great conversation. The problem solving round was too technical, hardly problem solving more DS/Algo. Question asked is marked hard on Leetcode and for hiring a manager's manager this could have been trimmed down a little.
Confirmed questions4 questions
- Tell me about the Dungeons Game problem, focusing on the data structures involved.
- Walk me through your design for Twitter, emphasizing scalability.
- Discuss your past projects, team management experience, and how you handle conflict resolution.
Rippling Engineering Manager Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Rippling interview reports.
“Design a hotel reservation system, focusing on the relational database schema for a smaller scale.”
Read reports →“Design a fault-tolerant, scalable, highly available, low-latency system to ingest and process events (like user clicks) from mobile and other devices, and support queries for historical click counts per hour over the last 24 hours.”
Read reports →“Design and implement a solution for managing a list of unique port IDs, ensuring O(1) time complexity for getting a free port (and marking it occupied) and releasing a specified port ID. Discuss different approaches, algorithms, and data structures before coding.”
Read reports →“Can you design a large-scale newsfeed system that handles tags?”
Read reports →“Design an end-to-end recommendation system, incorporating ingestion, indexing, and personalization, given frontend APIs, a database, a schema, and an event capture system.”
Read report →“Can you tell me what you know about Rippling?”
Read report →“Could you implement a spreadsheet?”
Read report →“Tell me about the Dungeons Game problem, focusing on the data structures involved.”
Read report →“Design and implement an object-oriented Excel Spreadsheet library for a frontend team, capable of displaying both raw and computed values. The system should handle integer values and formulas with the plus operator, with plans for future operator expansion. Consider data storage (e.g., HashMap vs. 2D array), computation strategy (on upsert vs. on display), impact of cell changes on formulas, and optimization of upsert operations.”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 11 Rippling interview reports.