Software Engineer · Phone Screen · System Design

Rippling — Software Engineer

Level: Unknown Level

Round: Phone Screen · Type: System Design · Difficulty: 7/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Unfriendly

Topics: System Design, News Aggregator Service, Push vs Pull, Celebrity Problem, Data Aggregation

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Interview date: 2026-01-27

Summary

Round 1: Phone Screen

Question: I was asked to design a News Aggregator Service similar to Google News. The requirements included users subscribing to topics and publishers, providing general top stories, personalized news, and redirecting users to news articles. We discussed Push vs Pull, and how to handle the celebrity problem.

Details

The system design question focused on building a News Aggregator Service, similar to Google News. The functional requirements were:

• Users can subscribe to specific topics.
• Users can subscribe to specific publishers.
• The system provides general top stories for all users.
• The system provides personalized news based on user subscriptions.
• Users are redirected to the actual news articles.

Follow-up questions revolved around:

• Push vs. Pull mechanisms.
• Handling the 'celebrity problem' (high load from popular publishers). I suggested tracking message click events partitioned by publisher ID. Consumers would aggregate and keep top K for each publisher, then globally aggregate to find the overall top K.