Stripe Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Stripe.

Interview

Coding challenge, one initial technical screen, two back-to-back technical screens, then a call with an engineering manager. Whole process took roughly 4 weeks, and the recruiter was incredibly nice. They do not do offer extensions, even if you have a competing offer though.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took a week. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in June 2015.

Interview

We talked on the phone for a 30 min, then they asked me to to study some materials they sent to my email. I had a couple of days to get familiar with the scenarios and software. Then I had a second interview where I pretended to handle a mock support call.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (Seattle, WA).

Interview

I'm a positive person but it was hard to be in this interview process. I usually recommend companies for interview practice but I recommend skipping Stripe if you're short on time/PTO since their layout doesn't follow other tech companies and the practice isn't fully transferable.

PROS
1. They will reimburse you for office travel; most companies don't.
2. I ate a peach here; it was tasty.

I'm racking my brain trying to find more pro's since I see the positive in almost anything, but not here. I will present some cons to be weary about in case you don't see yourself aligning culturally or need to maximize how you spend your time since it's a hot market out there.

CONS
1. I told the 1st recruiter that I wanted to work remotely. He said that's fine. I then talk to the 2nd recruiter in my location and he/she said you can't if you live in their office's city. Everyone needs to get on the same page.

2. It was almost 2 months between the recruiter call and the onsite. Limited headcount? Either way, this is time consuming if you have other interviews. I had to reach out to the recruiter because he/she ghosted me for about a month after I passed my phone screen.

3. Scatterbrained Interviewers/Recruiters/Process

Sometimes, I received feedback that I'm taking too long to code when I was just taking the 5 minutes to understand the prompt which is common practice and usually mentioned in the Stripe prep guide.

Sometimes, when I asked for what was expected behavior in the code during the coding exercises, I oftentimes received, "Just Google it.", as a response. Sometimes, on the other hand, I received some help. If the interviewers are just going to tell you to google it like "lmgtfy.com", then why are they there? If that's the case, just throw your candidates alone into a room and analyze their results later.

Sometimes they listened, sometimes I had to repeat myself 2-3x as they were distracted by their own laptops and weren't listening.

Recruiter was hard to reach, wasn't pleasant to talk to, and wouldn't respond to any of my questions after the onsite. Maybe they are understaffed, but usually recruiters are the fun people to talk to at other companies.

4. General Culture & Vibe

It's lunchtime. I look around and it feels like I've been transported to SF and my rent just rose by $2k; I look down and I'm wearing a pair of Allbirds; I don't own Allbirds. I.e., you could tell that I was surrounded by techies and that if you work here, lunch conversation will revolve around serverless computing and crypto. The average age was ~27. There is nothing wrong with any of this inherently, but if you want to diversify and work with interesting people, this isn't the place where you will do that. These are the kind of people that don't know how to shake your hand and look you in the eye, that was a summary of my experience.

5. Terrible Recruiting Laptops

The industry is leaning towards providing laptops instead of whiteboarding; good because this is a more natural environment.

What's not good and unnatural is providing laptops that you need to spend a chunk of every interview setting up, needing to login to Github but seeing previous candidates' profiles still open, needing to get an access code from your email and still seeing the previous candidate's inbox open, and having interviewers who are as clueless as you are with the laptop and throwing hacks at the wall to try and get it to work and wasting valuable interview time.

Other onsites will simply give you a Coderpad link; no weird setup needed besides knowing the password. That doesn't really work with Stripe's process; but if they want to defer from the rest of the industry, they'll have to debug the issues themselves, which they clearly haven't. After all, I've not had to own a personal laptop since college and don't plan to, but I guess I'm SOL if I don't want buy my own or use a VM at work.

6. Lunch

There was free lunch, good! Work here and it'll be yours.

What's not good is that I eat healthy and supposedly they have healthy food. Yet a few hours after the onsite, it felt as if I had swallowed a bowling ball and I had serious indigestion. I think it was because the food had a lot of sodium (it was Asian takeout style, so it probably did). It shows that even if they do give free food here, I will abstain and it won't be a perk.

7. Rejection Email

I appreciate that they email instead of calling since these calls are a waste of time. What I don't appreciate is they do it first thing in the morning on a Friday when I'm getting ready for the weekend. You couldn't have waited till Monday? You couldn't have made it a concise email, instead you had send me a long email with various platitudes like "We know you are talented" and "We wish you luck on your career" and "Unfortunately we will not be moving forward" blah blah blah. Actually, this email was a good microcosm for the whole experience: fluffed up nonsense.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. I interviewed at Stripe.

Interview

Had an initial call with a recruiter with some fairly standard questions about my background, nothing really out of the ordinary. Second step was a technical screen that involved sharing my screen on a Zoom call and doing some live-coding in the language of my choice. Pre-written tests were provided. The type of problem used, especially as a live-coding exercise, felt not too far off from having to do white boarding at a company like Google or Facebook, and really felt like it was designed in a way that was not inclusive of anyone that may actually be a talented software engineer but not be deeply immersed in sorting algorithms in really contrived scenarios... it's basically a minefield for anyone that prefers context for the code they work with and has performance anxiety issues.

Interview Questions

Interview

One Skype interview (a not-too-difficult algorithms question), then the in-person interview, which consisted of a simple algorithms question, a find-the-bug question, a systems architecture question, a design-and-implementation question, and then a chat about company culture and the interview process with one of the founders. Everyone was very pleasant to be around, and the food was quite good.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in April 2015.

Interview

Applied online and had 2 technical phone calls. One of which was on Skype and the interviewer had me code something (described below). After that they flew me in for a day of interviews at their San Francisco office. On the interview day itself I started off by a coding problem then next interview was a design and architecture problem. Those were the most technical components of the interview process. After that a small behavioural interview with a team manager. They pair you up with a lunch buddy if you're around for lunchtime (I had a morning interview). For my last interview, they had me find a bug in an open source project.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in February 2015.

Interview

One 30 minute phone screen, before being invited for an in-person. The in-person consisted of five one-on-one interviews split up between an API implementation problem, a couple of general coding problem, a "bug squash", and a more personality-oriented interview. Lunch was also provided, where you eat in the cafeteria with a provided "buddy".

Interview Questions

Application

I applied through a recruiter. The process took a week. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in September 2014.

Interview

I went through a phone interview, followed by an on-site.

The phone interview was quite simple, and asked me to implement a system of assign unique machine ids given a naming scheme.

The on-site had a bunch of interviews ranging from caching, databases, and scaling.

I didn't end up getting the offer, though

Interview Questions

Interview

Fairly standard algorithms phone screen, and then an all-day onsite interview. One question was to design and build a merchant dashboard from scratch in an hour and a half. One was storing Foursquare-style location check-ins and figuring out where a user is at a given time. One was debugging a project on GitHub. The debugging question was pretty annoying, since the interviewer and I spent about a third of the time trying to get a really old version of Ruby set up, which was required for that problem.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in July 2015.

Interview

Overall process:
1) Skype interview - started with a generic behavioral interview, then spent the rest of the time coding two different technical questions in an editor of your choice
2) 5hr onsite - there were 3 technical interviews, 1 behavioral interview, and lunch with an employee

Everyone was so nice to talk to. Really great crowd. Very sad that I didn't get the offer.

Interview Questions

Application

I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA).

Interview

Long but engaging process; all interviewers were prepared for the interview sessions. However, the atmosphere at the company was definitely progressing rapidly towards traditional corporate setup. Stripe has become a medium-large company and there's no escaping that. The interviewers covered all of the ground in relation to the job, and seemed to genuinely care about engaging and evaluating.

Interview Questions