Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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63 stories

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StripeSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2026

Passed the Tech Screen, Rejected After the VO (AI Coding, Integration, BugSquash)

Writing down my 2027 NG Stripe rejection (and, as a bonus, what I think is the most complete set of Stripe NG prep material you can find online). Timeline 2026.9.3 the role opened, I got a friend to refer me → 2026.9.4 got the OA → 2026.9.6 finished the OA, all test cases passed in half an hour → 2026.9.10 got an email from HR to schedule the Technical Screening → booked 9.16 for the Technical Sc…

RejectedOnsite3
StripeSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Oct 2026

Four-Part Split Tender Online Assessment

I converted the screenshot version into text, including some test cases, to help everyone prepare! Split Tender Many of Stripe's merchants rely on Stripe Terminal to accept in-person payments at the point of sale. In physical retail, it's common for a customer to cover a purchase with multiple payment methods. For example, they might cover a $100 purchase with a $40 gift card combined with a $60…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

A 20-Minute HR Screen, Ten Questions, Late Recruiter Call

This is the HR screen right after the OA. I booked 1:30 PM in the afternoon and the HR was 15 minutes late straight away. In the end I sent an email saying I was free for the next hour and he could call me any time, and right after I hit send the HR's call came in. The whole thing took 20 minutes. What were the main questions in the HR screening? Background Question "Would you tell me a bit of ba…

HR Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

OA, a Great Recruiter, and a Tree-Rendering VO Where I Finished Two Parts

I got the OA the same day I applied, probably a mass send-out. It was almost entirely a math problem, three parts in one hour, and the time was a bit tight. Part 1: Data Center Registration and Health State Management Part 2: Computing the Haversine Distance Part 3: Proximity-Based Routing A few days later I got the usual HR call. They said I did well on the OA, and asked me to briefly go over my…

In progressTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

OA with the Deployment Window Scheduler, Part 2 Unfinished

This was the OA round. It's the Deployment Window Scheduler problem that has already been posted on the forum. Build a deployment-window scheduler over a recurring 10,080-minute week. Find all deployable time slots. Part 1: the input is <startTime, endTime, type>, where type is either allowed or freeze. Output the deployable time slots <startTime, endTime>. Part 2: the first line of the input is…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Reconciliation, a requests 307 Bug Squash, BikeMap and an AI Exercise, No Offer

Payment / Invoice Reconciliation (problem as I reconstructed it) Part 1: match by the invoice ID in the memo. Parse the payment and invoice strings, use the invoice ID in the payment's memo to find the matching invoice, and return the string the problem specifies. A payment has a payment ID, an amount and a memo; an invoice record has an invoice ID, an amount and a due date. Part 2: add amount ma…

RejectedOnsite0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

AI Coding, Reconciliation, and a Debugger That Would Not Run

AI coding: It's the rule parser problem from the forum. I used the Opus model and kept talking with the interviewer the whole way through. Honestly, in the moment I couldn't fully understand what the AI wrote either (a lot of the time I have to read Claude's code over and over before I get it, I'm just not that good), but I got the feeling the interviewer was also only half following and just nod…

RejectedOnsite0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

A Two-Part Deployment Window Scheduler OA I Couldn't Finish

On 9/14 I applied to a mid-level role through a referral and got the OA right away. Honestly it was long and a total slog. Even using Claude I couldn't get it done. Problem background: Stripe needs a scheduler to manage service deployment times. Time is represented as minute_of_week, in the range [0, 10079] (a week has 10080 minutes in total). Input: part: "part1" or "part2" inputCsv: an array of…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
StripeSoftware EngineerSenior+
Sep 2026

Bug-Hunt, AI-Pairing, and Map-Drawing Rounds, No System Design

I've already forgotten what the phone screen was, but it wasn't hard. The onsite loop was really different from other companies — felt different from what I'd seen and from other people's experiences too. Round 1 was a bug-hunting round, roughly three problems. Make sure you set up your IDE and install the plugins ahead of time — the details are in the email. (I wasn't careful and didn't read the…

RejectedOnsite0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

A New Coding Question, a Blank Editor, Never Reached Part 3, and Didn't Pass the Phone Screen

It seemed like a new question — I don't think the interviewer had interviewed with this one much before 😅, he wasn't very familiar with it either. Communication took quite a while, and sometimes the shadow and the interviewer disagreed with each other 😅 Part 1 gave a main() and a function header — you just had to implement the function. The interviewer initially said the output was an integer, bu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

Feature Flag Design and an AI Coding Round, Rejected

I applied for the staff software engineer role. I'm not very strong, and I got rejected very cleanly. After the recruiter screen, they scheduled two rounds of a mini onsite (60 min * 2). The first round was system design. The question was to design a feature flag system, similar to Amazon WebLab. Because I hadn't prepared for it, and I had no systematic approach to open-ended questions, I got stu…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

UTC Deployment Windows and a 10-of-11 Assessment

Stripe's online assessment really required a huge amount of code, and the problem was both tedious and long. The problem gives a global UTC timeline covering the 10,080 minutes in one week, along with deployment rules defined in local time. The rules mark deployment as allowed or frozen and each has a corresponding time-zone offset. The task is to find and return the first K qualifying UTC deploy…

In progressOnline Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three Parts of a KYC Validation Problem

KYC, but verifying things like the company name, URL, abbreviation, and description. The first part was to check whether there was a business name. Skip entries without one. For entries with a name, check whether the remaining columns all have values. If they do, it's verified; otherwise, not verified. The output is verified/not verified and the name, one line at a time in input order. The second…

Technical Screen0
StripeSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Rejected After AI Coding and Integration + Bug Squash Onsite

Writing down my 2027 NG Stripe rejection (and, I think, the most complete set of Stripe NG prep material out there). Timeline 2026.9.3 the role opened and I got a referral from a friend -> 2026.9.4 got the OA -> 2026.9.6 finished the OA, all test cases passed in half an hour -> 2026.9.10 got an email from HR to schedule the Technical Screening -> booked it for 9.16 -> on 9.16 the interviewer had…

RejectedOnsite0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Three-Part OA on Data Center Routing

Online Assessment Part 1: Data Center Registration and Health State Management Need to implement the following two commands: REGISTER <region> <latitude> <longitude> <capacity>: registers a data center, with a default health state of healthy. SET_HEALTHZ <region> <state>: sets the health state of a given data center (true for healthy, false for unhealthy). Validation rules: Latitude must be in th…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware EngineerSenior+
Aug 2026

AI-Assisted Phone Screens, Rejected After Four Onsite Rounds

Two phone screens, coding with AI. My feeling is that you basically just need to show your ability to interact with AI — let the AI write all the code, and your job is mainly to review it, ask it what algorithm to use, how to design the functions and classes, and then once the code is done you comment on the problems with what it wrote. That's basically fine. I don't remember the actual problem.…

RejectedOnsite0
StripeSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

A 60-Minute Payment State-Machine OA

Stripe new grad SWE OA. I did it about a week ago, and my memory is a little hazy. It was basically a state machine + OOP. Sharing this to save everyone some time. 60 minutes, progressing through levels. Nothing difficult algorithmically, but there really was a lot of code to write. A payment system, using command-line-style instructions. One detail worth mentioning: every command has the same nu…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Jul 2026

OA to Onsite, Including an AI Pair-Coding Round and a Real GitHub Bug Bash

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OnsitePremium0
StripeBackend Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Stripe Backend Engineer interview: HackerRank parsing and data-processing assessment

I encountered Stripe through an online assessment that was not the usual LeetCode format. It had multiple parts on HackerRank and concentrated on parsing and data processing rather than graph problems or dynamic-programming patterns. I could not quantify the difficulty precisely, but it seemed to care more about how I handled text and data transformations than fast algorithm tricks. The assessmen…

Online Assessment0
StripeSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Stripe Software Engineer interview: incremental 60-minute assessment

The online assessment was difficult in a particular way: it had multiple parts that built on one another. The full window was 60 minutes, and I was racing the clock while implementing each piece in sequence. I did not advance past it. The assessment seemed designed to mimic real engineering flow, with each section unlocking the next. Once I fell behind, there was little room to recover because la…

RejectedOnline Assessment0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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