AI Coding Round Experience at Rippling - Senior Engineer

It was my first time actually going through one of these AI assisted coding interviews and I felt like it went well so I thought I'd share how I approached the use of AI during the interview.

Rippling doesn't seem to care what or how much you use AI. I asked my interviewer if it's ok to copy/paste the prompt into cursor, and they said I could use the AI however I want as long as I copy it back into hackerrank and delete any local files/chat history.

I was a bit hesitant to just let the AI do all of the design work, because I felt like that removes a lot of opportunities to show how I approach problems, so even though I did move the prompt over to cursor I didn't let AI actually do anything until I had talked through the approach I wanted to take.

I also tried to be very explicit about my prompting so it seemed clear that I wasn't leaning on the AI to do all of the thinking, just speed up my implementation. There were 3 coding parts to the question, and I don't think I could have implemented all 3 parts without AI.

The questions I got asked is the typical Rippling food delivery question. People have shared it a lot on here:

• https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7649290/rippling-offer-received-ai-coding-experi-ixr6/
• https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6850291/sde-2-rippling-offer-india-by-anonymous_-b9pq/
• https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/7196226/senior-software-engineer-rippling-reject-x5xx/

Another tip I have for the Rippling AI round is to use a fast model. There's a lot of code to write, but it's not really that complicated, opus is massive overkill. I was stressing out a bit for time while waiting for the model output and switched to composer for the followups.