Brief discussion with recruiter, then a system design screening interview before the onsite.

While I applaud Stripe senior management for attempting to improve the technical interview process (which frankly, across all companies, is now a joke dominated by memorizing answers to LeetCode and common system design questions), the lower ranks of the company have clearly not received the memo. The interviewers are unqualified to be conducting the interviews they are being roped into doing and have not received adequate training in how to discriminate between qualified and unqualified candidates.

I was asked a fairly standard system design question, for which I provided an excellent answer (based on real-life experience at the FAANG company where I currently work and where I myself ask these exact same questions).

The interviewer didn't like this answer and clearly lost interest in continuing the discussion when my powers of telepathy failed me in providing the precise answer that he was looking for. No attempt was made to understand my thought process, and no interest was shown when I went through tradeoffs and more advanced topics such as scalability and fault tolerance. The interviewer rudely cut the interview short (despite being 10 minutes late themselves) and refused to answer any questions about the team. They also weirdly commented that they "enjoyed the interview," which got my hopes up.

I was rejected and have received no feedback from the recruiter besides the generic "we're going with other candidates right now" (which is a very strange comment for a screening interview). Thanks for nothing.

The company's business model isn't special, and to be honest, based on the people I have spoken to, I expect this company to fail its IPO.

Distributed counter-based service. Standard system design nonsense, which you're never going to be using when you work there.