Rippling Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — An 11-Minute Late Start, a Chaotic Round, and a Recruiter Swap

The interviewer was 11 minutes late. I was actually about to just leave the call and email the recruiter to say they were a no-show, but they showed up at the very last moment.

After joining, there was no intro or behavioral portion at all — they went straight into technical. Right off the bat they asked whether I wanted an AI or non-AI technical round, and I picked non-AI.

Then the interviewer just dropped a big chunk of a problem on me — something like tracking each delivery driver's balance, and then asking how to return the total balance. I overcomplicated it at first, and only later realized they actually wanted a simpler, more direct approach. Overall they really emphasized caching, because this calculation would be called frequently, even run inside a loop, so it needed to be fast.

After that they asked a few similar follow-ups, also centered on optimizing with caching and prefix sums. The last question felt kind of sudden — it was merge intervals, and it didn't feel very connected to what came before.

Overall the interview experience was pretty chaotic, and the pacing wasn't great either.

In the end I got rejected. This is the least organized interview I've been through so far. And on top of that, my original recruiter disappeared partway through — they swapped in a new recruiter before the first technical round. Makes me wonder if something's off internally at Rippling right now.