Rippling · OA → Phone screen → Onsite
In process2019–2026 Rippling SWE Intern OA / Interviews: 42 Experiences (Part 1 :)
A seven-question OA, a string problem with four follow-ups, and a coding round that changed from DFS to Dijkstra all appear in these accounts.
Coverage: 42 separate Rippling software-intern application experiences across this two-part series: SWE/SDE, backend, full stack, one ML-software recruiting screen, and combined internship/full-time offers. Locations include the U.S. and Indian campuses; several reports omit their location. Interviews and reports span 2019–October 2026, including Winter and Summer 2027 recruiting. Part 1 contains the series-wide question-frequency table and 14 recent timelines; Part 2 continues with 27 earlier timelines. One cohort-dated campus account appears separately below.
What came up
Graphs and trees appeared in 11 of the 42 experiences. String operations, parsing and search appeared in 10, while eight described array or sorted-sequence tasks.
| Topic | Reports across the full series |
|---|---|
| Graphs and trees | 11 of 42 |
| Strings, parsing and search | 10 of 42 |
| Arrays and sorted sequences | 8 of 42 |
| Heaps, caches and top-K selection | 6 of 42 |
| HTTP, APIs and JSON | 4 of 42 |
| Dynamic programming and counting | 3 of 42 |
These counts include the explicitly historical reports. An experience can appear in several rows; reports without a disclosed topic stay in the denominator.
Questions we found
Algorithm and coding questions
| Question | Frequency | All last seen dates |
|---|---|---|
| Median of Two Sorted Arrays | 2 of 42 reports | 2025-12-16 (report date), 2025-12 (interview), 2025-08-18 (report date), 2025-07 (interview) |
| Walk through each solution’s time and space complexity | 1 of 42 reports | 2026-10-02 (report date), Jun 29 (year unstated) |
| Process orders subject to dependencies | 1 of 42 reports | 2026-07-05 (report date; interview a few months earlier) |
| Top K Frequent Words (scalability follow-up) | 1 of 42 reports | 2026-05-01 (report date) |
| Explain the split() versus strip() choice | 1 of 42 reports | 2026-01-29 (report date) |
| Maximum Parenthesis Nesting Depth | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-10-22 (report date), 2025-10 (interview) |
| Merge Two Sorted Arrays | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-10-25 (report date) |
| Median Across N Sorted Arrays (follow-up) | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-08-18 (report date), 2025-07 (interview) |
| Merge K Sorted Arrays | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-01-03 (report date), 2024-08 (interview) |
| Parse input, then find the median of two sorted lists · related Median of Two Sorted Arrays | 1 of 42 reports | 2024-10-03 (report date) |
| Maximum Weighted End-Pick Score (base and weighted follow-up) | 1 of 42 reports | 2022-08-29 (report date) |
| Maximum Score with K-step Jumps | 1 of 42 reports | 2022-08-29 (report date) |
| Count Numbers with a Prime Digit Sum | 1 of 42 reports | 2021-11-29 (report date) |
| Maximum Invitations on an N-ary Tree | 1 of 42 reports | 2021-11-29 (report date) |
| Maximum Average N-ary Subtree | 1 of 42 reports | 2021-11-29 (report date) |
| Minimum Rounds to Inform an N-ary Tree | 1 of 42 reports | 2021-11-29 (report date) |
| Optimal Score Difference in an Endpoint Game | 1 of 42 reports | 2021-11-29 (report date) |
| Comment Word and Substring Search | 1 of 42 reports | — (cohort only) |
| Lexicographically Minimum Stack Encryption | 1 of 42 reports | Reports: — (cohort only); Additional FastPrep history: 2025-01-26 (role/date basis unrecorded) |
| String transmission cost: matching pairs and partitions | 1 of 42 reports | — (cohort only) |
Low-level design (LLD)
| Question | Frequency | All last seen dates |
|---|---|---|
| LFU Cache with LRU Tie-Breaking (LRU ties explicit once) | 2 of 42 reports | 2026-07-28 (report date), 2026-07 (interview), 2021-11-29 (report date) |
Behavioral and project discussions (BQ)
| Question | Frequency | All last seen dates |
|---|---|---|
| Self-introduction | 6 of 42 reports | 2026-08-13 (report date), 2025-10 (interview), 2025-09 (interview period), 2025-01 (interview), 2022-08-29 (report date), 2021-11-29 (report date) |
| Why Rippling? | 4 of 42 reports | 2025-10-13 (report date), 2025-09 (interview period), 2025-07-13 (report date), 2025-01 (interview) |
| Project challenges and possible improvements | 2 of 42 reports | 2025-01-20 (report date), 2021-11-29 (report date), Aug 12 (year unstated) |
| Compare AI with earlier technology shifts | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-12-17 (report date) |
| How do you reason through difficult bugs? | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-12-17 (report date) |
| How do you use AI in your daily workflow? | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-12-17 (report date) |
| Why does problem-solving still matter when AI generates code? | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-12-17 (report date) |
| Describe the toughest challenge faced | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-10-25 (report date) |
| What do you know about Rippling? | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-01 (interview) |
| Work or project achievement you are proudest of | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-01 (interview) |
| Walk through a project and demonstrate it on GitHub | 1 of 42 reports | 2025-01-20 (report date), Aug 12 (year unstated) |
Online assessments (OA)
OA 01: Two seven-question accounts in 2026
Full-stack report: October 2, 2026 · Cohort: Summer 2027
The candidate completed seven questions: four data-structure MCQs, two medium coding tasks, and another coding task involving data fetching and JSON. They were still waiting for a response on October 5. The actual coding prompts were not shared.
New York SWE intern interview: July 2026
A separate candidate also described seven questions. Four were MCQs: two concerned heaps/max-heapify, one concerned DFS, and the fourth was not recalled. Three were easy-to-medium coding questions. The report also named GET requests to APIs.
OA 02: A cohort-dated IIT Kanpur account
Archive cohort: 2025–26 · Role: Software Developer Intern
OA
- Stack encryption. Start with a source string and empty temporary/output strings. Move the source’s first character to the temporary string’s end, or move the temporary string’s last character to the output. Repeat until the source and temporary strings are empty. Find the lexicographically smallest output.
- Transmission cost. Matching character pairs incur
sameTime; partitions incurpartitionTime. Minimize the total extra cost. The pairing and partition-charge rules were not formalized.
Live coding
Given comments with unique IDs and text, return IDs containing a supplied word. Extend the query to match inside a word. Case handling, tokenization, output order and collection updates were unspecified. Practice: Comment Word and Substring Search.
HR followed. The candidate emphasized OOP and explaining the approach while coding. The exact interview month and outcome were not given.
14 detailed candidate timelines, loops, and screens
01: A medium screen, another medium, then a project discussion
Report date: October 9, 2026 · Role: SWE Intern · Result: Accepted offer
The candidate entered through a recruiter. The first technical interview used a medium coding question. The virtual onsite added another medium question and a deep discussion of past work and projects. They described friendly interviewers; the exact prompts and location were not disclosed.
02: Summer 2027 full-stack OA
Report date: October 2, 2026 · Role: Full Stack Intern
The candidate personally completed the seven-question assessment described in OA 01. Four MCQs came first; the coding section included two medium problems and a task combining code with fetching and handling JSON. As of October 5, they had not received an update.
03: Debugging aloud in a New York coding round
Report date: October 2, 2026 · Role: SWE Intern · Location: New York · Status: No offer recorded
June 19: completed the OA.
June 29: three consecutive problems. After a bug and verbal slip on the first, the candidate fixed the bug and explained it. They finished the second and only outlined the third before time ran out. The interviewer asked for each solution’s time and space complexity. The interviewer accepted one less optimal solution without requesting further optimization.
July 9: a 60-minute coding session followed by a 45-minute technical discussion of resume projects, implementation choices and tradeoffs. The account gives month/day milestones without repeating the interview year.
04: A tree question stopped at part two
Report date: August 25, 2026 · Role: SWE Internship, Winter 2026 cohort · Result: Rejected after screen
After the OA, the candidate received a multipart tree task involving traversal, DFS and height. They did not finish its second part. The interviewer was described positively. Winter 2026 is the role's cohort label; the account does not give an actual interview date.
05: Passed the first Winter Intern technical
Report date: August 13, 2026 · Role: SDE Winter Intern
The candidate reported passing a first technical interview containing two DSA problems and a self-introduction. They had not received a second-round follow-up when they posted. No task details, office location or winter-term year were supplied.
06: OA passed; a one-hour screen was scheduled
Report date: July 28, 2026 · Role: SWE Intern
The candidate applied online, passed the OA and received scheduling materials. Their next appointment was a 60-minute CodePair technical with an SWE II. The instructions prohibited AI tools, offered a recording opt-out and said to check with the interviewer before looking something up. This account stops before the live interview.
07: Backend coding grew from traversal to shortest paths
Interview period: July 2026 · Report thread: August 2026 · Role: Backend SWE Intern, Winter 2027
One commenter described their own progressive 50-minute round. The first part used DFS and the follow-up required Dijkstra; the graph’s business rules were not shared. They also said their virtual onsite was followed about 12 hours later by team matching in late July. Their own team-selection list had roughly ten options. An office location and final offer were not established.
08: Team matching two days after the virtual onsite
Interview period: July 2026 · Report date: July 28, 2026 · Role: Full-stack Winter 2027 intern, from thread context
In the Waterloo recruiting thread, an independent candidate reported reaching team matching two days after their virtual onsite and then receiving an offer. They said team matching had happened about two weeks before their comment. They did not give the precise offer interval, interview questions or office location.
09: LFU in New Delhi
Interview date: July 2026 · Role: SWE Intern · Location: New Delhi · Status: No offer recorded
A campus applicant named LFU cache design as their own question. The report does not preserve its interface, follow-ups or eviction tie rule. Other students' questions were not this candidate's interview.
10: Seven questions in the New York OA
Interview date: July 2026 · Report date: July 15, 2026 · Role: SWE Intern · Location: New York
The applicant described four MCQs and three easy-to-medium coding questions. Heap/max-heapify, DFS and GET/API work were explicitly mentioned, as detailed in OA 01. No later live round was described.
11: Three-part search-query screen
Update date: July 8, 2026 · Role: Full Stack Intern · Result: Rejected the next day
After an earlier post asking about the upcoming screen, the candidate returned to say they had completed it. Their question concerned search-query processing in three parts. They did not publish the subproblems. Their posts in two communities describe one application experience.
12: An order-processing dependency graph
Report date: July 5, 2026 · Interview: A few months earlier · Role: Intern
A different commenter described their own order-processing problem. After unpacking the story, they recognized topological sorting. The interviewer supplied hints on edge cases. The comment does not establish the exact intern specialization or outcome; its separate API/rate-limiter suggestions were advice, not additional interview tasks.
13: Full-stack coding, web fundamentals and a resume deep dive
Report date: May 1, 2026 · Role: Fullstack SWE Intern · Result: No team match
January 8: HackerRank invitation; roughly seven or eight MCQ/coding questions reported.
Screen: a string task with four follow-ups, including top-K frequent words as datasets grew. The other follow-ups and exact scalability rules were not published. Practice for the frequency-selection component: Top K Frequent Words.
February 6: advancement notice, not the interview date.
Virtual onsite: three consecutive sessions—two medium coding problems; HTML/CSS/JavaScript fundamentals; a technical resume discussion.
The event year was not repeated. The candidate found no team match late in the cycle.
14: Easy questions, detailed questions about the code
Report date: January 29, 2026 · Role: SWE Intern · Location: San Francisco · Status: No offer recorded
The candidate described two or three easy coding questions, discussion of previous coding work and difficulties, and close questioning of functions used in their code. The concrete example was why they chose split() instead of strip(). The main coding prompts were not given.
In this series
Part 1 (current) · Part 2
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