I came to Stripe from a company that called itself a startup but ran like a nonprofit, which meant slow, political, low urgency. Stripe was a genuine shock. Not in a bad way necessarily, but I want to be honest because the "Stripe is wonderful" posts feel incomplete.
The good stuff: The engineering culture is real. I've worked at 4 companies and Stripe has the highest average bar I've encountered. The code review feedback is substantive, not performative. The writing culture (they're famously a writing-heavy company, docs before meetings for almost everything) means less performative Zoom time. I genuinely like that.
Ownership is real. My team shipped a meaningful product change in my first 6 months that I actually designed. Not just implemented. Designed.
The harder stuff: Pace. It's high. I'm not saying crunch culture, I'm not doing 80-hour weeks. But Stripe operates at a sustained level of intensity that after 14 months I'm still adjusting to. There's always another P0. Always another migration. The on-call rotation for my team is 1 week every 6 weeks, which is fine, but the on-call incidents are real incidents.
The private company thing affects culture more than I expected. There are no quarterly all-hands where Stripe celebrates a stock price milestone. Instead there's a lot of "we're building for the long term" language that I think is genuine but can feel vague when you're grinding.
Growth path: depends entirely on your manager and your org. I've seen people promoted in 18 months. I've also seen people who are excellent at their jobs sit at the same level for 3 years because they're too valuable to promote. Ask specific questions about this in interviews.
My overall read: If you want high-quality work, real ownership, and you're okay with sustained intensity and illiquid equity, it's a great place. If you need a clearer ceiling on pace or you're coming in for a low-intensity period after burnout (I almost was), be careful. Not because it's toxic, just because the default setting here is fast.