Stripe Interview Guide

The level of internal transparency and trust will shock you in a good way. You'll have more than enough information to decide if Stripe is a good bet with which to start your career. - Leadership (at all levels up/down the management chain) actually cares when it comes to diversity. They fundamentally "get" it, and are working hard on multiple initiatives in this area. Unconscious bias training is treated as table stakes and a starting point at most, rather than the silver bullet/checklist item that other companies seem to see it as. There are no ping-pong tables or a permanent games room (though people sometimes set-up Smash or board games after work). There is alcohol, but people only drink it in the evenings, and it tends to be a classy dinner with wine.

Stripe relies on a huge range of technology to build the best commerce tools available on the internet. In my roles as a software engineer that has given me the opportunity to work on machine learning infrastructure, user-facing big data products, and a sophisticated financial backend, among other projects. The company does worthwhile work. I'm proud that we've helped put hundreds of thousands of folks in business online. There are always bumps along the road for any growing company. The continual changes in infrastructure, tools, documentation, and process can be disorienting at best and frustrating at worst.

I've made some of my best friends here. Everyone is capable and comes from different backgrounds, and there's a culture of people helping each other. I've always found it easy to ask others for help; almost everyone was ready to make time to answer questions or give advice about something at work. Keep thinking about how the organization will scale and watch out for the pitfalls of growing a 200+ company. Things are good, but it takes real work to maintain that.

A fun, exciting place to work. A lot of self-direction. Thoughtful leaders. Not much management. The company cares a lot about making excellent experiences. This isn't just limited to users, they actively try to get feedback and iterate on the experience of working here. The little management here actively seeks out how they can do better. If you're into helping a quickly growing company solve interesting challenges, this is a great place for you. If you're not self-directed, you will be lost. Also, work-life balance could be better, although there's nothing extreme.