Stripe

Role: Backend Engineer (Admin Platform)

College: Not Specified

Interview Date: June 2024

Interview Type: Full-Time

Result: Rejected

Difficulty: Medium

Rounds: 3 (Resume Shortlisting, Hiring Manager Call, Screening)

Topics Asked: Behavioral (leadership, motivation), Data Structures and Algorithms (string parsing).

Experience:

The candidate applied directly on Stripe's Careers portal for a Backend Engineer role in Bangalore and was contacted after three months by the hiring manager.

Hiring Manager Call: Discussion about the candidate's experience, suitability for the role, and generic behavioral questions regarding leadership and motivation to join Stripe. The hiring manager explained the process and expectations.

Screening (1 hour): This round started with a DSA-based question, which the candidate had to code on a HackerRank link.

Coding Question: "Bracket Expansion". The problem involved parsing a string expression containing comma-separated tokens enclosed in curly braces, with potential prefixes and suffixes. The goal was to return a list of expanded strings. Example inputs and outputs were provided:

• Input: "/2022/{jan,feb,march}/report" -> Output: "/2022/jan/report", "/2022/feb/report", "/2022/march/report"
• Input: "over{crowd,eager,bold,fond}ness" -> Output: "overcrowdness", "overeagerness", "overboldness", "overfondness"
• Input: "read.txt{,.bak}" -> Output: "read.txt", "read.txt.bak"

Follow-up questions included handling cases with less than two tokens or incorrect expressions (e.g., missing braces).

The candidate received a rejection email a week later. They emphasized the need to be "very quick" during the interview process and to ask questions in advance about formatting and input provision to avoid last-minute code changes. They felt they only had time for the first follow-up question.