I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2018
Interview
Summary of the entire process:
- Initial chat with the recruiter
- Follow up with the recruiter
- Technical phone interview
- Onsite interview (Did not make it here)
I contacted a Stripe recruiter and we set up a time to chat about all the different roles available at the company. Our time ran over a bit, so we had a follow up to make sure all questions were answered and I fully understood the roles. They did a great job with scheduling and follow-up. The recruiter I spoke with was very friendly and did a great job explaining the positions to me.
Next, I had a technical phone screen with an engineer on the team I was applying for. It was an hour long, with some time in the beginning to explain the question and some time at the end for questions. I was able to use my own environment and share my screen via a Zoom call. The question was about allocating and deallocating servers, as mentioned in other reviews. It wasn't too difficult - it was more about seeing your thought process. You were able to reference Google or documentation if needed. It was a breath of fresh air versus cramming to memorize some data structures and algorithms you might not use on the day to day.
I thought I did extremely well but unfortunately, I didn't make it to the onsite.
First an OA which is very hard, you have to be really fast. Then HR call and then phone round. Unfortunately I got unlucky and my interviewer was doing something else while doing the interview, he was muted and I had to ask for his attention twice. Of course in the end he said I did very well and one day later I was rejected. The phone round is not particularly difficult but you have to be fast and talking too much will cost you.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They have a bunch of questions about string parsing, more often than not you will need to read a CSV so know how to do that, and know how to use the split function.
1 round of team screen - go/no go with a multi step problem
Design - classic interview
Integration - work on integrating some new systems
Bug bash - find and solve a bug
Programming exercise - same as team screen maybe a bit harder
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Stripe in Jul 2026
Interview
started with a quick recruiter chat (checking developer infrastructure know-how), followed by a 45-min live coding screen where they look for production ready code. onsite was 5 rounds: coding, bug bash, integration, system design, and behavioral. bug bash was the most interesting part. they just drop you into a random repo with failing tests and watch how you track down the root cause. integration is pure API work - reading docs and wiring things up, but they lean heavy on error handling. sys design felt very grounded. instead of drawing huge scalable architecture, we basically just talked through failure modes and backward compatibility.behavioral was standard. across the board, stripe cares way more about readable code and communication than tricky algorithms.for prep, practice reading other people's code and fixing bugs. i had a mock on prepfully with a stripe SWE to test my bug bash process, and it really highlighted some messy debugging habits i had. tough loop, but it actually feels like real engineering.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a stream of Stripe checkout session events, identify sessions abandoned at each step of the checkout flow and calculate conversion rates