Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Stripe with 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 45.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 21 days to get hired, when considering 242 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Stripe overall takes an average of 26 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Stripe as a Software Engineer according to 242 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 42%
One on one interview: 23%
Skills test: 14%
Presentation: 9%
Group panel interview: 6%
Background check: 2%
Other: 2%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
Personality test: 1%
Drug test: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in May 2018
Interview
I was exploring some other remote opportunities, and I knew someone who worked at Stripe so I decided to check things out to see if it might be a good change of scenery.
First I had a phone call with a recruiter who told me about the company and the engineering teams. Then set up a technical screen that was conducted over Zoom (the format was "pair programming").
I did virtually no preparation as the other responses on Glassdoor signaled that the technical interview question would be more of a real world problem (server provisioning) and I figured there wasn't much I could do to ready myself for that. I was expecting to be evaluated on things like SOLID design principles, etc.
In the end my technical interview focused on comparators, and most of the content of those questions felt like they might have come straight off a site like hackerrank or the like. Each question built off the last. None of it was particularly difficult, but I must say the format of the interview had me pretty nervous and it was really tough to focus. Because the interview is only ~45min long, you also don't have time to read through the specifics of any of the problems. The interviewer summarizes things, and you jump into implementing code that makes some tests pass, bouncing ideas and questions off the interviewer as you go.
I ultimately got hung up on one of the last questions we worked on, not because the question itself was particularly difficult, but the explanation was a bit fuzzy in the moment.
Overall the experience was good. The interviewer was also very engaged and professional. I mostly kick myself for not taking the whole thing a bit more seriously. The technical problems ultimately didn't feel terribly relevant and likely wouldn't resonate with a lot of the day to day work of most developers (I've done full stack dev for the last decade, building lots of complex systems, and I can't recall the last time I did work resembling this).
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