Stripe Software Engineer interview experience

The debugging round in particular was brutal: I was dropped into complex repositories that were hard to even reason about at first glance, and I had to work through nontrivial issues while the rest of the interview kept the focus on careful thinking rather than just producing a quick algorithm answer. The interviewers were friendly, which made the challenge feel more like a real engineering conversation than a typical “gotcha” coding session.

What stood out to me was the way the bar was framed. It wasn’t just about “grind LeetCode and vibe.” I sensed they valued clear reasoning, product