I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Stripe in Aug 2021
Interview
Completed phone screen.
For the first round, the question was fairly trivial. I believe there are 3 parts to it and if you don't complete all 3, then you're automatically disqualified.
The interviewer was a staff engineer and hard to connect with and couldn't even answer "what is the company culture like". The person said "I'm probably the worst person to ask"....what a red flag. Maybe a one off, but still. Definitely pick a language youre comfortable with to write code AND unit tests. The interviewer is basically mute the entire time even when youre trying to show off a bit of collaboration.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a string of accepted languages from a request header and an array of strings of languages supported by server. Return list of languages that will work for request.
3 parts: 1. basic. 2. language only string w/o country code.
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