Stripe Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Month of No-Shows Before a Tight Three-Part Python Screen

Timeline: Early July, first round was an HR phone call — the interviewer showed up a few minutes late. Mostly asked about location, discussed salary and compensation, my previous work experience, why I chose Stripe. (Though she did mention Stripe supports fully remote, which was a nice touch.)

After that we agreed to schedule the technical phone screen, but then they sent the wrong email template, and it took me a week and two follow-ups to get it fixed.

For the first technical phone screen, the interviewer was half an hour late... I couldn't wait any longer and went to work. We ended up rescheduling again, to this week. So altogether it took a month just to get this sorted.

A few days after the second round interview, I got notified to move on to the next round, the VO.

I really want to ask everyone: is this a red flag? But I do still really want to work at this company.

The interviewer for the second round was a very enthusiastic woman, a senior who'd been there for years, fully remote. She talked really fast and was quite chatty during conversation, though of course she went quiet while I was coding. This one went fine, the experience was pretty good overall.

Interview process:

We started with a quick self-introduction and then went straight into the technical portion. It was the question that's been coming up most often recently.

It was a cost-calculation problem, three parts total. The interviewer sent the problem through HackerRank; I opened it, copied the problem description into my local IDE, then shared my screen and started pair coding. The interviewer paid attention to:

• Whether the output matched what was expected
• Whether I considered corner cases, like:
• Whether a dict key in Python was present in the "database"
• Whether the input numbers were valid
• Whether sorting was needed, and how to write the lambda for it

She watched closely the whole time I was coding and responded to some of my questions. Based on her reactions, I think I did okay.

In the last five minutes I asked her some questions back — about the project she's currently working on, how often people turn over on her team. She was pretty tight-lipped about giving interview feedback, didn't reveal much, so just try to think out loud as much as you can.

Some tips:

• Even though it's a recycled/known question, the time pressure is still very real! I ended up finishing all three parts, wrote close to 500 lines of Python total (plenty of copy-pasting involved, of course), but I was pretty anxious by the end.
• Being comfortable with your own IDE really matters. I made some typos and small mistakes along the way, but because I know my own setup well, I fixed them quickly. That said, I went quiet for a while during the coding itself, and I'd like to work on that.
• Seriously, pick Python if you can. Otherwise the time pressure is way too much.

The first part was mostly reading the problem, clarifying, then writing code — took about 20 minutes. The other two parts built on the first part's code. By the time all three parts were done, I had less than 10 minutes left.