Medium
Rippling

Design an Expense Management System Object-Oriented Design Interview

Model the core domain objects, state transitions, approval policies, and audit history for an employee expense management system.

1. Problem Statement

Design an in-memory expense management system. A candidate can submit an expense, it routes through one or more approvers according to a configurable policy, and eventually reaches a reimbursed or rejected state. Start by clarifying the scope and key objects.

2. Live Coding Format

Work in the provided coding workspace while explaining your decisions to the live interviewer. Validation may use inline tests, examples, comments, or a verbal walkthrough.

3. Key Focus Areas

  • 1
    Expense entity modeling and state machine (Draft → Submitted → Approved/Rejected → Reimbursed)
  • 2
    ApprovalPolicy abstraction for routing rules
  • 3
    Idempotency at the service boundary
  • 4
    Immutable audit log derived from transitions
  • 5
    Separation of entity, policy, and service responsibilities

4. What Strong Candidates Should Demonstrate

  • Model an Expense entity with explicit state machine invariants and guarded transitions.
  • Separate approval routing policy from the Expense entity itself.
  • Design idempotent service operations at the object/service boundary.
  • Produce an immutable append-only audit history from state transitions.
  • Write handwritten tests that cover state transitions and policy routing.

Want interactive feedback?

Practice this problem in the live coding workspace while the interviewer probes your clarification, implementation, trade-offs, and validation.

Continue to Dashboard

Core Concepts

Object-Oriented DesignState MachinePolicy AbstractionAudit Trail

Continue preparing

Build a complete software engineer mock interview plan

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design a Hotel Management System

Design a hotel domain model covering room types and rooms, guests, a half-open date-range value object, the reservation lifecycle, room assignment, check-in/out, and a charges folio, while preventing overlapping bookings on the same room.

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design a Multi-Elevator Dispatch System

Design a controller for multiple elevators that accepts hall and cabin requests, schedules cars, models movement and doors safely, and supports replaceable dispatch policies.

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design a Restaurant Management System

Design a restaurant domain model covering tables and capacity, reservations for time slots, seated parties, a menu, orders with priced line items, kitchen status, and bills with payments, keeping booking and order/kitchen state transitions correct.

Related Object-Oriented Design

Design an Airline Management System

Design an airline domain model covering airports, aircraft seat layouts, scheduled flights versus dated flight instances, passengers, reservations and tickets, seat assignment, and flight status transitions.