I know, I know. Another Stripe interview post. Bear with me because the format has changed a bit from what I was reading in older threads.
As of early 2026, the Stripe coding process for SWE roles went like this for me:
No automated OA at the initial stage (at least for mid-senior levels). I got a recruiter screen, then jumped straight into a 45-minute technical phone screen with an engineer. No HackerRank link. This may differ by role or team.
The phone screen was one coding problem in a shared editor (Coderpad). The problem was medium difficulty by Leetcode standards, but with a Stripe twist: the problem was framed around API rate limiting and processing a batch of events with different priorities and quotas. Not a graph problem. Not a DP problem. Think more: clean implementation, edge case handling, reasoning about partial failures.
They cared a lot about how I handled the case where part of the input is malformed. I wrote a defensive check early, commented it, and they asked me to walk through my reasoning. That conversation probably mattered as much as getting the algorithm right.
Language: I used Python. They're fine with Python, Go, Ruby, Java. Nobody cares which one, just use what you think in.
For the onsite coding rounds: two more of these, similar format. One was heavier on data structures (I got something tree-adjacent), one was more of a design-and-implement problem where they gave me an API spec and asked me to write the implementation. The second type felt more real-world.
Difficulty overall: harder than most Series B companies, easier than Google. The Stripe-specific framing is the real differentiator. Generic Leetcode prep will get you through the algorithm part but won't prepare you for the "now handle these edge cases in a payments context" follow-ups.
One thing I noticed: they do NOT want you to go heads-down and code silently. The engineers I had would ask "what are you thinking" within 2 minutes of silence. Treat it like a conversation.