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%
Personality test: 1%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
Drug test: 1%
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I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe
Interview
Overall bad experience. Most of the interviewers seem disinterested, no enthusiasm when talking about the company. After the interviews the recruiter ghosted, the only feedback was a copy/paste reject over a week later. Emails asking for feedback or a follow-up call were all ignored.
Coding Round
The interviewer was fair enough. I just didn’t complete enough parts of the question. The frustrating part was 126 lines of markdown explaining the question. Unreasonable to expect someone to parse through that long of a problem description for a 30min problem.
Given a String, split it into major parts separated by special char '/'. For each major part that’s split by '/', we can further split it into minor parts separated by '.'.
# ### Example 1
# str = stripe.com/payments/checkout/customer.john.doe
# minor_parts = 2
# after Part 1 compression
# =>
# s4e.c1m/p6s/c6t/c6r.j2n.d1e
# after Part 2 compression
# =>
# s4e.c1m/p6s/c6t/c6r.j5e
# ### Example 2
# Given:
# str = www.api.stripe.com/checkout
# minor_parts = 3
# (after Part 1 compression)
# =>
# w1w.a1i.s4e.c1m/c6t
# (then after Part 2 compression)
# =>
# w1w.a1i.s7m/c6t
Integration Round
They supply two JSON files containing requestlog of charges made on Stripe API. You write a function to test them by replaying the request to a live API.
Part 1 you compare the HTTP status code
Part 2 you need to record and compare certain ID’s between requests. At first this seemed simple enough, wrote the code to do this, it wasn’t working so start debugging. Interviewer doesn’t appear to know what’s going on either. With 2 min left says something about the type of ID being different, as in you get say a Customer ID vs Charge ID. This wasn’t mentioned in the problem description or in the part 2 description.
Manager Round
This was quite annoying, the managers face was about ¾ in the camera. Like dude you ever zoomed before? He was constantly yawning during the interview and asking (unrelated) follow-up questions to give the appearance that he gave a crap.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
String compression
Comparing API result and expected response
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