Personal interview notes
Brett Potter's Ramp Interview Study Prep Guide
A focused prep guide for Ramp engineering interviews: coding patterns, systems design moves, product judgment, fintech context, and the small details worth remembering under pressure.
Coding Patterns
Placeholder for the short list of patterns to review before the interview. Keep this practical: problem shape, cue, approach, edge cases, and one clean implementation note.
- Hash map counting and lookup problems
- Two pointers and sliding windows
- Intervals, sorting, and sweep-line thinking
- Graph traversal and shortest-path tradeoffs
- Dynamic programming only where the recurrence is obvious
Systems Design
Placeholder for Ramp-shaped systems design prep. The goal is crisp tradeoffs, not architecture theater.
- Start with product requirements, scale, latency, and consistency
- Call out data model decisions early
- Use queues for payment, notification, and reconciliation flows
- Design for idempotency, auditability, and failure recovery
- Make observability and operational playbooks first-class
Ramp Context
Placeholder for public Ramp notes: product surface area, customers, finance workflows, expense management, corporate cards, approvals, accounting integrations, and what great engineering judgment looks like in that domain.
Day-Of Notes
- Clarify constraints before coding.
- Say the simple solution first, then improve it.
- Name the tradeoff, choose, and move.
- Test with ugly edge cases.
- Keep the interviewer inside the loop.