Rippling System Design Questions

Design News Pull Scheduling, Article Storage, and Topic Reads

Design a news aggregation service like Google News. The system periodically pulls articles from thousands of publishers (RSS/APIs), stores article metadata (URL, title, publisher, topic ID, publish time), groups reports of the…

Also reported as: Design a News Aggregation Service · Design a Deduplicated Personalized News Feed · Design a Performant Frontend News Feed +10 more

Design a Hotel Search and Reservation System

Design a hotel or rental booking system like Booking.com or Airbnb. Users search listings by location and date range with filters, view availability and a price quote, book a room or property, and cancel; hosts manage listings,…

Also reported as: Design a Hotel Booking System · Design a hotel search and booking system

Design a User Behavior Tracking (Clickstream Analytics) System

Design a user behavior tracking (clickstream analytics) system that collects events such as page_view, click, app_install and purchase from web and mobile clients across multiple products, and lets teams query and visualize…

Also reported as: Design a user behavior tracking system · Design a user behavior monitoring system

Build Reliable Employee-Operations and Expense Intelligence Systems

Design an expense policy and violation processing system for an HR/finance platform. Companies define expense rules (e.g., meals over $75 need a receipt, no alcohol, per-diem limits by city); every submitted expense is evaluated…

Also reported as: Design Scalable Expense Violation Processing

Design centralized log ingestion and query system

Design a centralized logging platform (like ELK, Splunk or Datadog Logs) for a company with thousands of services and hosts. Agents collect logs from applications and infrastructure, ship them reliably under backpressure, and the…

Also reported as: Design a scalable logging system

Prevent Duplicate Payments Under High Load

Design a payment processing system (like Stripe's core) that handles about 10,000 transactions per second between merchants and external payment providers. Support the full lifecycle: authorization (place a hold on funds with low…

Scale a rules engine for high traffic

Design a rules engine that evaluates customer-defined rules (conditions and actions) against high-traffic events in real time, e.g., 'if an employee's department changes, then update their access'. Discuss the rule representation…

Design in-memory delivery billing core APIs

Design and implement in-memory core APIs for a delivery billing system: add drivers with hourly rates, record deliveries (driver, start and end time), compute the total cost of all deliveries, pay drivers up to a given time, and…

Design an ad-click aggregation and enrichment pipeline

Design an ad click and impression aggregation system. Ingest a high-volume stream of ad events ({ad_id, campaign_id, user_id, event_type, timestamp}, billions per day) and provide aggregated metrics (clicks, impressions, CTR per…