Stripe Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Month of Scheduling Delays, Then a Tight Three-Part Coding Screen

Timeline:

• Early July: first HR phone call, interviewer was a few minutes late. Mainly asked about location, discussed compensation, my past work experience, why I chose Stripe. (But they mentioned Stripe supports fully remote, which is pretty nice)
• After that, they agreed to schedule a technical phone screen, but then sent the wrong email template again — it took me a week and two reminders to get it fixed
• First technical phone screen, the interviewer was half an hour late... I couldn't wait any longer and went to work. It ended up getting rescheduled again, to this week. So altogether it took a whole month to get this sorted...
• A few days after the second-round interview, I got notified that I'm moving on to the next round, the VO

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

The second interviewer was a super enthusiastic woman, a senior who's been there for years, fully remote. She talked really fast and was quite chatty during small talk, though obviously quieter while actually writing code. No bad surprises this time — the experience was pretty good.

Interview process:
Quick self-introduction to start, then straight into the technical portion. It was the question that's been coming up most frequently lately — a "calculate cost" problem, three parts total. The interviewer sent it over through HackerRank; I opened it, copied the problem description into my local IDE, then shared my screen and started pair coding.

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

👀 Things the interviewer paid particular attention to:

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

The whole time, the interviewer was watching me code closely and responded to some of my questions. Based on her reactions, I think I did okay.

⌛️ In the last five minutes I asked her a few questions back, like what project she's currently working on, how often people on the team turn over, that kind of thing. She was pretty tight-lipped when it came to interview advice, didn't give away much — just try to think out loud as much as you can.

A few tips:

• Even with a question you've already seen before, the time pressure is still real!
  By the time I finished all three parts I'd written close to 500 lines of Python (a good chunk of it copy-pasted, sure), but I was still pretty rushed toward the end.
• Knowing your own IDE cold really matters.
  I made some typos and small mistakes along the way, but because I was familiar with my own setup I fixed them fast. That said, I had some pretty long silent stretches while coding, and I hope to work on that.
• Seriously, just pick Python if you can!
  Otherwise the time pressure is brutal.