I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in Mar 2016
Interview
Technical phone screen involving a couple of simple technical questions, then 5 interviews at the Stripe office: three coding, one design, and one with manager
The bug squash interview became derailed because running the full test suite failed for reasons unrelated to the code containing the bug. We spent a good 20 minutes trying to figure out why the test suite crashed with one implementation of the bug fix when it took less than 10 minutes to actually fix the bug-that time is better spent moving on to another bug
My only other issue with the process is that I did not feel like I received any real feedback about my performance throughout the interview. I encourage the interviewers at Stripe to give honest feedback at the end of each technical interview, or for HR to collect feedback from the technical interviews to give to the candidate during the evaluation. When a candidate is able to produce solutions for all the coding questions, it's important to let them know where they could have improved so that they feel they've been given due consideration for their time
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Design an API for tracking events in different clients
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