Stripe interview walkthrough
What Stripe does
Fraud detection
API
2M+ businesses
99.9999% uptime in 2020
Used with deliveroo for managing payments
Interviewers
APAC - Bank Payment Methods
APAC - Cards team
Interview process
- Application
- HackerRank
- 1x Technical Screen
- 2x Technical interviews for interns 3x Technical interviews for interns
- Manager Chat
- Offer
HackerRank
60 minutes, submitted within 2 weeks.
Format: Provided tests and hidden tests
Focus:
- Code quality
Technical Screen
45 minutes
Coding problem from scratch, work through programming exercise, explain thought process.
Onsites
- Programming Exercise
15mins setup, 45 mins interview
Create and tackle with a small program from scratch
- Integration
60mins, using existing library and code to fulfill spec.
Can you help yourself & read documentation?
- Bug Squash (New Grad Only)
Find & triage bug in large existing code base.
Can you fix it?
Manager Chat
30mins
Describe technically challenging project technical contribution cross functional why work at Stripe?
Sample Problem
Common python libraries
datetime collections
At Stripe, customers aare paid everyday except holiday.
Given list of holidays: [Date] List of payouts and scheduled dates like: [{amount: Int, date: Date}]
- Consider ALL cases:
- Duplicate payout dates
- Holidays accounted for
- Consecutive holidays
- Overflow end-of-month holiday payouts
2. Clarifying questions to ask
3. Approach
4. How would you ensure all special input cases are met?
5. What are some possible failure modes to avoid?
- avoid rolling ur own implementation, since these are complex to deal with. Use established ones e.g. `datetime`
If you need to use a library, you are free to google and integrate it on the spot.
## What is measured during interviews
1. Communication
- Explaining your work
- Responding to feedback
E.g. telling you to check edge-cases, mark as TODO, let them know you want to get solution first.
- Professional and Courteous
2. Scoping
- Understand problem scope
- Edge cases
- Ask questions, state assumption
- Break down the problem
- Run the code incrementally and iteratively
3. Writing Code
- Code abstraction & quality
- solving the problem
- ask if you need to validate types of values
- know your language, your development environment, accept code practices
## Resources
CtCI
leetcode, hackerrank
mock interiews
rest api
how does http work
swe pattern
statistics
state machines
data structures
databases
## Interview questions
API
Parsing urls
Parsing datetime
JSON parsing for http requests
Given a list of hash maps, look up the min value
Hashmap interface
Collections library
Debugging open source codebase - Python