I got the rejection letter within two days! They said something like: being more precise about this role, which means they sometimes have to reject candidates who are very impressive. I compared emails with a friend and it turns out this line is an old script Stripe likes to reuse. Not sure, but I have a feeling they ultimately wanted someone with a finance background that fits fintech better.
I interviewed for two rounds total. The process HR sent me was: HM interview - case study 45 mins - take home - final round & take home presentation. I searched for previous Stripe interview experiences and it seems like there wasn't a case study second round before — they used to just send the take-home directly. Looks like the bar really has gone up — more precise, as they say.
First I went through an HM interview. It went smoothly, thirty minutes, mostly about my background.
The second round was a case interview:
if Stripe is going to provide a new product "Capital," which provides pre-qualified loans to all current merchants. The payment rate is 12%, which means the merchant needs to pay 12% * daily revenue, every day.
q1: if we are creating a dashboard, what metrics would you use?
q2: how to determine we should NOT give this prequalified loan to any merchant? aka what early signal you need to gather to determine which merchants are not going to pay back the loan?
q3: if we are thinking about providing multiple options of loans vs a single loan amount, what are the pros and cons?
q4: if we found Capital's profit decreasing, how would we diagnose it?
The interviewer was really good at giving emotional support — kept praising me the whole time. I'd also prepared a lot myself, so the whole thing felt amazing, very smooth. Maybe that also made me overlook some details.
It probably also exposed some gaps in my finance vocabulary. I wanted to say the merchant's ability to repay, but I genuinely didn't know how to phrase it, so I just said "pay-ability"?
lol
Everyone was really nice, but getting rejected still stings a little — the pay is good after all. Gotta keep grinding.
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