Went through the Stripe virtual onsite in Q1 2026 for a staff SWE role. Posting the structure since I couldn't find a clean breakdown for 2026.
Total rounds: 5 over 2 days
Day 1 (3 rounds back to back with breaks): Round 1: Coding. 45 min. One medium-hard problem in Coderpad. Mine was about correctly processing a stream of financial events with retries and deduplication. Round 2: System design. 60 min. Design a fraud detection system that operates in real-time on transaction data. (Definitely a Stripe-internal flavor.) Round 3: Values / behavioral. 45 min. Dedicated round, not tacked on.
Day 2 (2 rounds): Round 4: Coding, second one. More of a design-and-implement flavor. Given an API contract, write the implementation. Round 5: "Bar raiser" equivalent. A senior/staff engineer outside the team. Mixed: some system design probing, some behavioral, some coding questions asked conceptually.
Feedback speed: they told me 3-5 business days, I got a call in 4.
Level: staff (L6) Offer was around $380K total comp. Base in the $190s, equity around $170K over 4 years, small cash bonus. NYC.
Accepted. Start in 3 weeks.
The bar raiser round felt the most evaluative. The engineer explicitly told me he's there to "calibrate across teams" and he went harder on the system design follow-ups than day 1. Don't drop your energy for the last round, that's when it matters.
Hardest part of the loop: staying sharp across two days of rounds when you're also doing 3 other loops. Logistics are annoying but manageable.