Stripe VO was divided into several rounds. The whole process was intense but rewarding. In this blog, I'd like to share in detail the interview process, the feeling of each round, and some preparation tips that our team led our trainees through, in the hope that it will be useful for other people who are preparing to hit the Stripe </a or similar top tech companies.
Round 1: Coding
Usually conducted on a shared online editor or whiteboard, candidates are asked to think and communicate as they go along and ultimately write runnable (or at least well-thought-out and logically correct) code.
Question type
- Operations and applications of basic data structures such as chained lists, trees, and graphs.
- Dynamic programming, greedy algorithms.
- String handling, array manipulation.
- May involve some understanding of concurrency, locks
Stripe VO Exclusive Question Sharing
You will receive a series of commands to simulate a basic merchant and payment system. Each command is a space-separated string containing keywords and parameters. You will need to maintain a mapping of merchants and their balances, as well as payment records.
Each command can be one of the following two:
- INIT merchant_id balance: Initializes a merchant and sets its initial balance.
- CREATE payment_id merchant_id amount: Creates a payment for a particular merchant. When the payment is successfully processed, the amount will be added to the merchant's balance.
The payment status and process is implicit: once the payment is successfully processed, its amount is added to the merchant balance.
importation
A list of strings, each representing a command.
exports
The final balance status of each merchant after all commands have been executed.
Example
[
"INIT m1 1000",
"CREATE p1 m1 200",
"create p2 m1 300".
]
{
"m1": 1500
}Round 2: System Design
This round is usually an open-ended question where the interviewer will give a scenario of the system to be designed and the candidate will have to design it on the whiteboard and discuss it interactively with the interviewer.
Stripe VO Exclusive Question Sharing
Each country / product has a corresponding transportation cost matrix. Costs are stored in the smallest currency unit.
Transportation cost matrix
{
"US": [
{"product": "mouse", "cost": 550}, {"product": "laptop", "cost": 1000}
{"product": "laptop", "cost": 1000}
], "CA": [ {"product": "mouse", "cost": 550}
"CA": [
{"product": "mouse", "cost": 750}, {"product": "laptop", "cost": 1,000}
{"product": "laptop", "cost": 1100}
]
}(purchase) order
{
"country": "US", // CA for Canadian orders
"items": [
{"product": "mouse", "quantity": 20}, {"product": "laptop", "quantity": 5}, {"item": [
{"product": "laptop", "quantity": 5}
]
}Round 3: BQ
This round is usually situational questions based on past experiences and the interviewer will dig deep into the details. Interviewers will focus on a candidate's ability to communicate, collaborate, resolve conflict, leadership, attitude toward challenges and failure, and fit with Stripe's cultural values.Stripe places a high value on teamwork and integrity!
Round 4: Product/Cross-functional
Typically open-ended questions that will be discussed in the context of a specific Stripe product or business scenario. Requires the ability to understand business and product requirements, think from multiple perspectives (user, product, technical, commercial), and the ability to communicate and collaborate effectively in a cross-functional team.
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