Tech screen: Easy SQL, easy Python HM call: Nice guy, general convo about the tools/tech I’ve worked in. Reasonable and down to earth. No tricky questions, just a convo about DE. Loop: - Interview with the VP. The VP trash talked the recently-departed CTO, said 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 mongo DB to redshift. - Coding interview. 2 LC 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 that 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.