I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2024
Interview
There are 6 interviews total, not including recruiter screen, divided into a round of 2 and a round of 4 (if you pass round 1). The themes for the first two are "Experience and Goals" and then "Strategy and Execution". These are 45-minute interviews and rely heavily on STAR-style narrative answers to "Tell me about a time..." type questions.
After Round 1 you are asked to complete a "written exercise", which is really to prepare both a report and a (supposedly optional) presentation covering a project you completed as a manager in the past that represents your work. You submit the report and then give an interactive presentation as one of the interviews.
The other three interviews in Round 2 are:
- System Design
- "People and Organization" -- mostly trying to gauge the organizational complexity you've had experience operating at before
- Role Play Interview -- you role play a manager and an interviewer role plays an engineer on your team
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
System Design: How would you create a reporting service that acts as a transaction balance/ledger based on transactions happening in an existing transaction service?
Management Role Play: The scenario was to attempt to assign an urgent 12-week audit to a senior engineer who is excited to work on something else (a non-urgent refactor), and get them to delegate the refactor to others. Getting the engineer to agree to the assignment was not required.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Stripe (Bengaluru)
Interview
Process was smooth, well defined. There is enough guidance to prepare. There was a design round, a technical presentation round, a role play and a few managerial rounds. Overall well executed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked to design a key component of their payments system.
long and time consuming but still a great experience for the candidates. definitely have a high bar when it comes to hiring and leadership. i think the organizations and processes interview doesn’t lend itself to people coming from non big tech backgrounds but that’s my only feedback.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Give and example of a time you had to get a bunch of stakeholder buy in across the company?
I applied online. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in Jul 2025
Interview
Applied online and moved through a quick recruiter screen. The mini-onsite had two rounds - first was around people management: handling tough team dynamics, hiring approach, and leading through ambiguity. Second was technical: a bit of live coding and a lightweight system design - nothing crazy, but you need to be clear on trade-offs and decision-making. The onsite had four rounds. Started with system design with a tech lead - think ledger service or analytics pipeline. They care more about structured thinking and scalability than perfect answers. Then came two management-focused rounds - one behavioral, one role-play. Expect scenarios like shifting a top IC off a project they love, or resolving engineer conflicts. Final round was a 20-min technical presentation based on a 1000-word doc about a project I led - deep tech dive plus business outcomes, followed by intense Q&A. Used Prepfully for mocks - helped a ton with surfacing the right kinds of examples and stress-testing my manager stories. The process is a little tough but fair - make sure you put strong emphasis on clarity, ownership, and leadership judgment.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
design a system that aggregates and consumes analytics events