Software Engineer · Phone Screen · Coding

Rippling — Software Engineer

Level: Unknown Level

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 7/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: System Design, API Design, Data Structures, Algorithms

Location: Remote

Interview date: 2026-01-15

Summary

I had a technical phone screen where I was asked to design and implement a system to evaluate expenses against a set of rules. The goal was to identify expenses and trips that violate the rules.

Details

I was asked to design a system to process rules and mark expenses/trips that violate them. Here's the scenario:

My team is building a product that provides company-issued credit cards for employees to use for business expenses. The system allows setting policies to prevent employees from misusing the cards or exceeding spending limits. I needed to design the architecture to support this functionality.

Initially, the rules are basic:

• No restaurant expenses exceeding $XXX
• No airline ticket expenses
• No entertainment expenses
• Single expenses must not exceed $XXX
• Total trip expenses must not exceed $XXX
• Total food expenses per trip must not exceed $XXX

Example expense data:

expenses: list[dict[str, str]] = [
    {
        \