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Sr. Data Engineer Interview Experience - San Francisco, California

April 1, 2024
Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Tech screen: Easy SQL, easy Python.

HM call: Nice guy, general conversation about the tools/tech I’ve worked with. Reasonable and down to earth. No tricky questions, just a conversation about DE.

Loop:

  • Interview with the VP. The VP trash-talked the recently-departed CTO, saying that all the bad reviews about Rippling are true because “the CTO was stupid and hired a bunch of stupid engineers we had to get rid of.” More of the token “this isn’t a place to rest and vest. Lots of changing directions and urgency. The CEO changes his mind a lot, and we all work long hours. The rumors are all true. It’s hard to work here.”
  • Interview with Sr. DE about a large project deep-dive I completed. At the end, the interviewer again told me that the rumors are true and Rippling’s culture is all true. People get worked to the bone and frequently fired.
  • System design interview with Staff DE. Told me to design a batch ETL pipeline to get data from MongoDB to Redshift.
  • Coding interview. Two LeetCode medium problems: graphs + recursion. Medium/hard questions. Solved the first question and cleared all edge cases. Interviewer told me that the VP I spoke with earlier was pushed out of the company and announced his resignation the day before I spoke with him. I’ve gotten offers at 6/10 Top 10 tech companies in the past 3 years. Never seen graph traversal or DP in DE interviews. Apparently, at Rippling, data engineers are traversing graphs.
  • Email from recruiter the next business day stating they were passing on me. No feedback. No reason cited.

The interviewers all seemed tired and stressed. I had 3 different recruiters involved during the process; none of them knew what the other was doing.

Questions

BFS graph traversal problem for currency conversion.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Rippling Sr. Data Engineer role in San Francisco, California.

Success Rate

0%
Pass Rate

Rippling's interview process for their Sr. Data Engineer roles in San Francisco, California is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive0%
Neutral0%
Negative100%

Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Rippling's Sr. Data Engineer interview process in San Francisco, California.

Rippling Work Experiences