Stripe

Stripe Technical Screening | Difficulty: Medium The interview consisted of a single real-world programming problem divided into three progressive parts. Each subsequent part unlocked only after successfully passing the current one. Problem Statement: Merchant Relationship Analysis You are given a collection of merchants, each having details such as a merchant ID, email address, shop name, and other attributes. Your task is to identify relationships between merchants based on their shared attributes. Part 1 – Direct Relationships: Parse the input containing merchant details and identify all merchants directly related to a given merchant. Two merchants are considered related if they share at least one attribute. Part 2 – Weighted Relationships: Each matching attribute is assigned a score. Two merchants are directly related only if their matching score meets or exceeds a given threshold. Part 3 – Transitive Relationships: Relationships can be indirect. If merchant A is related to merchant B, and merchant B is related to merchant C, then merchant C should also be included when finding all merchants connected to A. Return all directly and indirectly connected merchants. The emphasis was on writing clean, readable, and modular code with well-defined functions. Input parsing was an important initial step, followed by implementing the required business logic and producing the expected output. The problem tested practical coding skills rather than a conventional LeetCode-style algorithm. I had practised similar real-world programming problems extensively beforehand and successfully solved all three parts. However, I faced some difficulty with input parsing because I chose C++. Preparation tip: Practise multi-part programming problems involving input parsing, data modelling, hash maps, and graph traversal. I would recommend using Python for this interview format, as it makes parsing and manipulating structured data easier, allowing more time to focus on the core logic. Result: Pending