It was a technical phone screen with an engineer where I shared my screen. The question was pretty interesting, about allocating and deallocating server ids, it's been posted many times on glassdoor and looks like they only use this question to interview. However, bottomline is I solved the question, wrote test cases, one test case failed and I went back and fixed the issue to get it working. By the time I finished coding, it was a full-fledged working solution and all test cases passed. The interviewer was quite friendly through-out and seemed genuinely interested in how I was solving the problem. Overall, I really liked that they used a real-world problem instead of things like "reverse a binary tree" or do bit manipulation etc. I was pretty much sure that they would want to invite me for an onsite after such a great interview experience.
However, next week when I pinged the recruiter, the recruiter got back giving some obscure reason for rejection. I am still wondering what went wrong! Are they even hiring or was this just a fake interview? I felt like I completely wasted my time. Later I saw on glassdoor that another candidate had the same experience - same server allocation/deallocation problem, all test cases passed and still a reject. I mean, you'd think that if you are able to write good code within given time constraint that passes testcases that's probably good to get an onsite, (it wasn't even a hire/no hire call) but I guess not! Only a waste of time for me.
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 Jul 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