Ramp · Primly Community

Just finished my Ramp loop: 5 rounds, a lot of fintech edge cases

backend_bekah · 5 replies

Wrapped up my Ramp loop last month, sharing what I actually remember.

Round structure: recruiter screen (30 min, pretty standard), async coding challenge via their own platform (90 mins, 2 problems), then 3 live rounds in the same week: one DS&A, one system design, one behavioral with an eng director.

The async challenge was interesting. Both problems had financial domain flavor: one was basically modeling transactions with edge cases around rounding and currency conversion. There were hidden test cases that caught my initial solution. Spent the first 30 minutes just reading the problem carefully, which I think was the right call.

System design was "design a spend limit enforcement system." Pretty on-brand. They wanted real-time vs. batch tradeoffs, idempotency for the approval flow, what happens if the charge happens while the limit check is in flight. Classic distributed systems stuff but domain-specific.

Behavioral was fine. The director asked for a time I had to make a hard call with incomplete data. Had a decent story from my last fintech job, which helped.

Overall: technically rigorous but fair. They moved fast: offer 4 days after the final round. Base was strong, equity was smaller than I expected relative to the total comp. Negotiate.

5 replies

market_realist

the currency rounding edge case is notorious across fintech interviews. half the companies just pick IEEE 754 and call it a day; the ones who actually ship payments know it's a minefield. curious if they specified a rounding mode or left it open.

backend_bekah

they left it open, which i think was the point. i asked clarifying questions about which direction to round in ambiguous cases, mentioned banker's rounding, and they seemed happy with the fact that i knew the tradeoff existed. no right answer, just show you've seen this before.

corp_refugee

spend limit enforcement in distributed systems is legitimately hard. if you haven't read the Shopify or Square postmortems on exactly this, worth it before any fintech system design round. the race condition between check and charge is the whole problem.

numbers_only

what level was the offer? trying to triangulate where their bands sit.

backend_bekah

mid-senior, something like L4/L5 equivalent. posting comp separately in the thread below.