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 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 48% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 11 days to get hired, when considering 3 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Stripe overall takes an average of 30 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Stripe as a Software Engineer according to 3 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 67%
Skills test: 33%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Stripe (San Francisco, CA) in May 2017
Interview
Initially had a Skype interview where I shared my screen with the interviewer. Fairly straightforward question about allocating/deallocating servers, and wrote unit tests for these too. To all those who wonder why they got rejected despite all their unit tests passing: I read somewhere online that this initial round is really just about testing your intuition for what makes good code.
Heard back a few days later that they wanted to bring me onsite. Had a whole day of interviews. Questions were all interesting, practical problems to solve. No obscure algorithms/whiteboard coding were involved at all.
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 July 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