Stripe has some very nice people, which for I wasn't able to find in many other places. My phone interviewer was a senior engineer. They were extremely friendly and kind even though I had some technical difficulties setting up Hangout at first, and later had some issues with my runtime stuff on my laptop.
They brought me onsite a few weeks later. There were 4 interviews + lunch. I liked that for coding questions, you get to work on your own IDE and can google things like apis for libraries. The first interview felt a lot like a normal engineering task rather than a typical problem solving question, which was neat, because I felt like it was closer to reality. The second one was debugging an open source code base. I didn't do well in that one because I wasn't that familiar with the particular subject matter. Also, I felt like the interviewer wasn't as helpful as they could have been but I could be biased. The third interview was the weirdest. It was actually the easiest of all interviews - a straightforward problem solving coding question. The interviewer seemed very detached from the beginning and barely said anything during the whole interview. Unfortunately, I misunderstood the problem statement, and even though I communicated my interpretation of it upfront and asked for confirmation to proceed, the interviewer said sure and didn't catch it until half way into the interview. I had to re-write most of the code because of that. I did finish the coding part and some testing in the time left, but the interviewer didn't seem impressed or happy, just total detachment and a fake and forced politeness. The fourth one was a design question. The question was interesting and the person was nice and it went well.
I got a rejection a day later, and the recruiter (who was very nice) was able to give me some feedback after I asked for it, which was nice. In general the feedback aligned with my suspicion.
Overall nice people and positive experience, except for the one interviewer who didn't really do their job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Not your typical hard problem solving. No need to do extra preparation other than be familiar with the tools you use everyday.
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