What is the hiring process like at Stripe?

Talented people, beautiful office, good food, good compensation & benefits, interesting problems to solve. Extremely tech-forward, a surprised given how large and established the company is. Solid product and future. Great leadership and high transparency. So much to learn with lots of agency. Growth is unbound and limitless.

Moves fast, problems can be challenging and daunting. Not for the faint hearted. Very steep learning curve. The intense interview process is meant to weed out those who likely won't survive in the culture.

Stripe is full of highly intelligent and motivated people. They have excellent hiring processes which means you're surrounded by the best and brightest. In turn this has led to them developing excellent products. They also have an inspiring vision to fundamentally change how payments happen, and in turn delivering more value to businesses.

60+ hours a week are normal at Stripe. Their view is it's a race and they want to win. The main challenge I saw while working there was the company strategy & bets constantly changed (except core payments). It's important to pivot and be flexible, but the frequency with which Stripe did this means a lot of wasted effort planning and re-planning. The founders are exceptional but some of the other leadership hires weren't great, hence a regular rotation at the L team.

- Great collaborative environment - Opportunity to visit US and work with like-minded great folks. - Smooth communications with US/global teams - Great comp

- Better work located still in US - Faced paced. Can be churned out in few quarters if not keeping up the pace. - Tough hiring process

- Stripe's product and value proposition are unique and strong. They are trying to solve an old and hard problem. - Technology is very strong - Founder's vision is bold and far-reaching

Though the company has clear operating principles, the ability to realize that all depends on each manager. I just had a quite frustrating experience. Got hired after a very thorough interview process and relocated. Four weeks into the job, my employment got terminated all of a sudden without any prior indication. All the feedbacks I got during that short period were positive and colleagues were very supportive. When I asked the HR and the hiring manager why, I only got the standard answer, which doesn't make sense. As a result, I lost three months of time and turned down another better opportunity because of my commitment. Apparently, the specific team within Stripe doesn't value my commitment at all.

- Stripe's product and value proposition are unique and strong. They are trying to solve an old and hard problem. - Technology is very strong - Founder's vision is bold and far-reaching

Though the company has clear operating principles, the ability to realize that all depends on each manager. I just had a quite frustrating experience. Got hired after a very thorough interview process and relocated. Four weeks into the job, my employment got terminated all of a sudden without any prior indication. All the feedbacks I got during that short period were positive and colleagues were very supportive. When I asked the HR and the hiring manager why, I only got the standard answer, which doesn't make sense. As a result, I lost three months of time and turned down another better opportunity because of my commitment. Apparently, the specific team within Stripe doesn't value my commitment at all.

Free lunch when you're at the office. Decent medical insurance. Good wellness.

Managers are incompetent. PIP culture. They call it a 4 week coaching plan but this is a PIP. At the time they give you this coaching plan to improve, they've already notified the People Team of your upcoming termination. People team is not on your side. They are only there to make sure nothing illegal is said. I also felt discriminated against. My team was all white people (very nice, don't get me wrong), and the hiring manager only hired white people... particularly people he worked with at Meta. No growth opportunities. You are stuck at your level hired, and then kind of forced to move on after 3-4 yrs. Massively reduced pay bands in 2024. I accidentally came across some comms about this (another sloppy security mistake by the team). Be ready to burn the candle at both ends. If you're not up late catching up on project work, you will be called out for it and given a bad midyear/end of year review. They work on 3% margin so they try to push products like Radar (fraud prevention which is mediocre compared to services like Sardine), and Capital (predatory lending that ends up being 25+% interest rate on loans). Stripe will struggle through the economic downturn caused by Trump.

- Excellent collaboration: coworkers tend to be smart, "exothermic", and want to help each other. Most ICs want to learn & grow. - Quality of work: Generally, shipped code is solid quality and well-reviewed. That said, no company is perfect, including Stripe; incidents are not uncommon. - Improvement mindset: New features are constantly being shipped and the company is always being "edited". - Opportunity: With the complexity of Stripe's product, day-to-day work is rarely stale. In my experience, ICs always want to learn together and are thoughtful about releasing good work constantly. - The Collison brothers attempt to (1) be transparent in company communications, (2) listen to employees, and (3) make frequent company-wide appearances. - Most tech teams respect focus time. - Documentation is ubiquitous. - Comp is solid

- Intense work culture: Reorgs are constant, layoffs are common, and performance standards are sky high. IC jobs never feel safe. - Middle Management: breeds culture point above. Disconnected from nuances of how tech works. Elitist leaders with flippant attitude about how work gets done. - Inconsistent direction: company priorities and direction often shift when senior leaders are hired or Patrick reads a new favorite book. The perceived value of your work can change month to month. - Over-documentation: Duplicated docs almost always exist. It's rarely clear where up-to-date / maintained documentation can be found. Red-tape around projects and decisions often requires docs prior to taking action, which drives further confusion. Changes in documentation software preferences (Confluence, Dropbox Paper, Google Docs, etc...) is also to blame. - Incidents: Intense, high-visibility, grueling and frequent. Unfortunately, incidents are the only way to get the attention of middle management. You may have to fix someone else's bug over the weekend and accurately gauge the impact to avoid the ire of your skip-level.

Comp is good. Equity is okay and hopefully it turns into something, however it feels like they've been dangling that for a long time now.

The more arrogant place to work, where everyone thinks they're better then the next. So rare to find a sense of team here - everyone is in it for themselves due to the overemphasis on the annual talent review process.

-The pay and benefits are fantastic, and the company goes all out to make employees feel taken care of in those regards. -Some genuinely good people -The company is doing exciting things and expanding into new avenues of business

-Very PIP driven culture, while expressly tiptoeing around calling it that. Feedback I received in a performance cycle was framed as recommendations, and when asked if it was a PIP, I was told it was not. Only for it to be referenced as a "performance plan" in a latter performance review a year later, and a mentor partnership being called a "coaching plan". There's a preaching of transparency and feedback, but my managers never gave me feedback on performance during 1:1s, only to unleash a deluge of it when it was convenient for them. -Toxic politics when it comes to the AE team, there were some AEs who went out of their way to throw other members of the Account Team under the bus to deflect customer feedback on their own performance. I watched one jr AE in particular spend more time pushing a customer to support instead of selling them a solution because they were afraid of talking to them. In addition, they attempted to push other employees to take action in ways that broke protocol, and then put them blame on them. No manager support in this regard either. This particular individual would also take credit for tasks I completed, with zero pushback from management. -Lack of ownership guidance for multiple roles. The TAM team in particular seems to have a very nebulous definition of what they were responsible for. I found myself multiple times taking on tasks meant for CSMs and TAMs, and received similar feedback from my counterparts on those teams. Again, management did little to help in defining those when it was brought up.

Stripe is solving some very interesting problems in the fintech space. The products are innovative, and you get to work on meaningful projects that make an impact.

The structure of the internship program heavily depends on the mentor assigned to you (stripe calls them "intern managers"). Interns are somewhat isolated from the broader team, and mentors might not always be experienced. In my case, my mentor was unhelpful, created a toxic environment, and implied that I needed to work overtime. I felt they downplayed my contributions in the review process and framed me negatively to cover their own mistakes. Despite having great peer reviews, the final evaluation leaned heavily on the mentor's feedback, which seemed biased.