Recruiter phone call.
Technical screen - LC type interview as usual but slight twist.
Onsite over 2 days involving a hiring manager talk, system design, LC interview, check out a repo and make a program interview, and check out a large repo and debug various bugs interview.
Overall - Stripe is clearly trying to break from the mold of the interview process but failing. It really indexes on the wrong attributes and requires a person to be 100% ready to develop on their machine live and have done it extensively. On top of this, they expect you're using OS X and not any other operating system. If you're not interviewing on your regular dev machine (definitely against company policy...), good luck.
Oh and no feedback. Don't bother for practice at least because the questions are too weird. People were okay but kinda "meh" overall. I barely talked to anyone in the office I was interviewing for. Instead I mostly talked to people who weren't located anywhere near where I was interviewing. Pretty dumb tbh because there is a huge cultural difference between offices.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Create a program from scratch that will use various APIs along with geolocation data files you're given to create a path. This is rather trivial but requires you can easily parse and send HTTP requests out from your language of choice. Don't use node... Bad docs for built-in libraries.
2. Check out this large repo and try to fix 3 bugs. You need to have a working IDE for this. You cannot fix some of them without running them in a debugger. If you do not have an IDE that can do step-through debugging on your machine, you will not pass. You need to get through all 3 to pass the interview - it is not about seeing your "process".
3. Talk about projects you worked on, etc. Typical hiring manager questions - nothing unusual.
4. Some system design question. Wasn't hard but interviewers DO NOT like interviewing. So, realize that and try to just end the interview soon. People at this company don't always enjoy doing interviews. It's clear that many people get roped in (even at Stripe's size) to do interviews when they don't want to do them.
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