Rippling rejected me after the onsite, still confused about their bar

Rippling rejected me after the onsite, still confused about their bar

Just got the rejection email from Rippling after doing their full onsite, three rounds total including the phone screen, and honestly I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong. For some background, I'm about 6 YOE, mid level, been interviewing on and off since my team got restructured earlier this year.

Phone screen was their AI coding round, the delivery cost and driver payment system, three parts. I used Cursor with Claude since that's what the recruiter recommended, got through parts 1 and 2 clean but only sketched an approach for part 3 before time ran out.

Somehow that was still enough to move to onsite. Virtual onsite had a system design round on the hotel booking problem, search plus ingestion plus making a reservation. I went with hitting the DB directly instead of an ES index which in hindsight might've been the wrong call because the interviewer kept steering me back toward it. Then an HM round where I walked through a past project, that part felt fine tbh.

Got the no the next day. No specific feedback, just the standard email. Kind of demoralizing since I thought the SD went okay even with the pushback. Anyone else feel like Rippling interviewers already have one answer in mind and grade you against it? Trying to figure out if I should even bother reapplying down the line.