Ramp onsite, the architecture round had a surprise SD tacked on

Ramp onsite, the architecture round had a surprise SD tacked on

Just wrapped my Ramp virtual onsite, 4 rounds in one day, still waiting to hear back but figured I'd write up the whole thing since I didn't see much detail on the later rounds anywhere.

Phone screen a few weeks back was the URL traversal problem everyone talks about. You get a seed URL, hit it, and the response either gives you a list of next URLs to follow or eventually a terminal value once you've walked the whole graph. I made the mistake of assuming the response shape early on instead of just printing it first, which cost me a few minutes when a passkey field showed up buried in one of the nodes. Got through it with time to spare once I slowed down and actually read what was coming back.

First onsite round was coding, flight data analysis. Had to implement get_user_with_most_flights() and get_user_location(time) off a JSON dataset, the second one wanted a binary search approach once the data got big. Also had to poke around pytest and figure out the file imports before I could even run anything, which ate into the clock more than the actual logic did.

Then came the AI coding round, multi-source data reconciliation. You're given records from a couple different sources that are supposed to represent the same entities but don't line up cleanly, and you have to define your own matching logic and justify it to the interviewer as you go. Honestly still not sure how they're scoring the AI usage part of it, nobody really explains that piece.

Third one was billed by the recruiter as a project deep dive, not a system design round, so I prepped a solid walkthrough of a past project. Went fine for the first 40 minutes, then with maybe 20 minutes left the interviewer pivoted into a real SD question out of nowhere, counting website visits in the last minute. Sliding window, not too bad once I got past the whiplash of the format switching mid-round.

Last round was standard behavioral, why Ramp, what are you most proud of, nothing unusual.

Heard back three business days later, still processing the outcome. If you get the deep dive round, don't let the recruiter's description lull you into skipping SD prep entirely.