I applied through a recruiter.

Started with a quick recruiter chat (checking developer infrastructure know-how), followed by a 45-min live coding screen where they look for production-ready code. Onsite was 5 rounds:

• coding
• bug bash
• integration
• system design
• and behavioral.

Bug bash was the most interesting part. They just drop you into a random repo with failing tests and watch how you track down the root cause. Integration is pure API work—reading docs and wiring things up, but they lean heavy on error handling. Sys design felt very grounded. Instead of drawing huge scalable architecture, we basically just talked through failure modes and backward compatibility. Behavioral was standard.

Across the board, Stripe cares way more about readable code and communication than tricky algorithms. For prep, practice reading other people's code and fixing bugs. I had a mock on Prepfully with a Stripe SWE to test my bug bash process, and it really highlighted some messy debugging habits I had. Tough loop, but it actually feels like real engineering.

Given a stream of Stripe checkout session events, identify sessions abandoned at each step of the checkout flow and calculate conversion rates.