Went through the Stripe loop for a backend L4 role in February. Took about 5 weeks start to finish.
Recruiter screen was 30 minutes, pretty standard: why Stripe, current comp, timeline. Then a take-home. The take-home is real. It's not one of those 'write a to-do list app' things. Mine involved building a small HTTP server that handled a subset of a payment-adjacent API, error handling included. I had 72 hours but honestly it took me about 6 hours of actual work.
Onsite was 4 back-to-back sessions (virtual). One pure coding, one system design (I got 'design a webhook delivery system,' which is very on-brand for Stripe), one 'collaboration and influence' behavioral, and one eng manager chat.
The system design round caught me off-guard. The interviewer was clearly an expert and pushed hard on retry semantics, idempotency, exactly-once delivery. I had studied distributed systems but this was more specific than most. Narrating my thinking helped a lot. Every time I made an assumption I said it out loud.
The behavioral round felt more like a structured conversation than interrogation. Questions were roughly: tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical direction and what you did. Tell me about a time a project slipped. I had my stories ready but they wanted specifics, not vague 'we worked together and it was great.'
Got an offer. My advice: really study idempotency and retry logic. And do a practice take-home under timed conditions before the real one.