I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (London, England) in Apr 2021
Interview
Brief discussion with recruiter then system design screening interview before onsite.
Whilst I applaud Stripe senior management for attempting to improve the technical interview process (which frankly across all companies is now a joke dominated by memorizing answers to leetcode and common system design questions), the lower ranks of the company have clearly not received the memo. The interviewers are unqualified to be conducting the interviews which they are being roped in to doing and have not received adequate training in how to discriminate between qualified and unqualified candidates.
I was asked a fairly standard system design question, for which I provided an excellent answer (based on real life experience at the FAANG company where I currently work and where I myself ask these exact same questions).
The interviewer didn't like this answer and clearly lost interest in continuing the discussion when my powers of telepathy failed me in providing the precise answer which he was looking for. No attempt was made in understanding my thought process and no interest was shown when I went through tradeoffs and more advanced topics such as scalability, fault tolerance etc. The interviewer rudely cut the interview short (despite being 10 minutes late themselves) and refused to answer any questions about the team. They also weirdly commented that they "enjoyed the interview" which got my hopes up.
I was rejected and I have received no feedback from the recruiter besides the generic "we're going with other candidates right now" (which is a very strange comment for a screening interview). Thanks for nothing.
The companies business model isn't special and to be honest, based on the people I have spoken to, I expect this company to fail its IPO.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Distributed counter based service, standard system design nonsense which you're never going to be using when you work there
I applied online. I interviewed at Stripe (New York, NY) in Apr 2026
Interview
An intro screen call with a recruiter, followed by 2 hour-long initial assessment interviews for coding (not leetcode) and system design. After the assessment rounds came a longer loop consisting of an hour-long "integration" coding session involving working with an existing codebase and interacting with external APIs, a 45-minute "adaptability" behavioral session, a 45-minute technical discussion involving presenting and answering questions about a former software project to other software engineers, and finally an hour-long career history discussion with the hiring manager. Overall everyone from the recruiter to the interviewers were very friendly and helpful.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a time you disagreed with a colleague about the direction of a project.
started with technical recruiter screen. then scheduled a technical interview (coding and architecture) round. after that is more specific sessions with the team and other non-technical people. process took a little more than a week start to finish and the stated goal was two total weeks
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
architecture problem was around scaling a global system
coding was a series of increasing complexity and requirements
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (Toronto, ON) in Sep 2025
Interview
7 stages.
- Screening call
- initial code challenge
- 4 more code challenges
- behavioural
The 4 code challenges and behavioural are schedules as a panel, all in one day, an hour each, or you can split them into two days. Interviewers seem to be chosen at random, and are not necessarily going to be a part of your team.
I applied for staff developer role, backend, and they for some reason put me through a full stack interview process. One of the challenges I got was about frontend code, which was not supposed to be a part of my process (and my HR representative agreed), but nothing was done to correct this mistake.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- consume an api endpoint
- create a formatted report from some raw json data
- reformat some data from one raw format to another, add filtering capabilities
- find a bug in an opensource library
- create Ui element that shows a list of items, add different distinguishing elements to some of the line items.
- discuss a project you worked on in the past, how did you ideate it, pitch it, how did you break it down, minimize risk, what went well, what didnt go well, how did you approach buy-in, stakeholder management, deadlines, delivery.
Staff Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Stripe with 3.4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 86% positive. To compare, the company-average is 45.9% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Staff Software Engineer roles take an average of 33 days to get hired, when considering 7 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 Staff Software Engineer according to 7 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 26%
Presentation: 13%
Group panel interview: 13%
Background check: 13%
One on one interview: 13%
Skills test: 9%
IQ intelligence test: 9%
Drug test: 4%
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