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%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
Personality test: 1%
Drug test: 1%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
Online Assessment
It was a 60-minute test on HackerRank. The problem wasn't algorithmic, but rather implementation-heavy. I had to parse a command string and execute the commands, which simulated transactions between users’ bank accounts. It wasn't very difficult, but the implementation was fairly long.
Phone Screening
The next round was a 45-minute phone screening on Zoom with one of the engineers. This was a live coding round, which I could attempt either on my local IDE or in their HackerRank sandbox.
Again, it involved an implementation-based problem with 2–3 subparts. Each subpart built upon the previous one.
Programming Round
This round had one programming question (with multiple subparts), which I attempted in C++.
Bug-Squash Round
I was given access to an open-source C++ repository and asked to fix two bugs within an hour. I used a debugger and breakpoints to trace and fix the issues.
Manager Chat Round
This was a final, non-technical, 30-minute round with an Engineering Manager.
Some of the questions I recall:
A deep dive into my internship experience (both technical and non-technical)
Questions about how I approached my project, its impact, and follow-ups
My goals as a software engineer for the next two years
A technically challenging past experience and how I handled it
Why I believe Stripe is the right career fit for me
1
Other Software Engineer Interview Reviews for Stripe
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