Stripe Engineering Manager (EM) Interview Guide

tl;dr

Stripe is a financial services and technology company with a clear mission statement: “to grow the GDP of the internet.” Their organization was created to improve online transactions, handle payments and security, and create new pieces of financial infrastructure. They are best known for their payment processing services, which allow merchants of all sizes to easily integrate a streamlined payment solution into their website, app, or product purchasing flow. They also offer point-of-sale (POS) systems to brick-and-mortar businesses, along with other financial products like loans and credit cards.

Founded in 2010, Stripe has grown both organically and through acquisitions to a headcount of 8,500, based mostly in the Bay Area and their co-headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. Since their founding, they have processed approximately $1.5 trillion in value, accounting for 17% of all online transactions. As is often the case with former startups, the company’s hiring process is always being iterated upon, but they do stick to some clear principles, favoring people who are meticulous and focused on offering the best to users.

Stripe’s culture is similar to FAANG companies in that it moves quickly and is hyper-focused on offering the highest possible quality. They are also committed to collaborative and customer-focused work, and favor hiring and promoting people who seek out and act on direct customer input. If you are someone who likes working in a highly dynamic environment, proactively seeks out feedback, and has familiarity with cross-team collaboration, you might find Stripe to be a great place to work.

What does a Stripe Engineering Manager do?

As with most companies in the space, Stripe has a range of products and services, some external, such as their POS system and payment service APIs, and some internal, such as security, data processing, and so on. Each of these has a team or set of teams that work on building, maintaining, and improving the performance of the product. The engineering teams assigned to each may range in scale, but generally speaking, are made up of ~8 engineers supervised by an engineering manager. Here are some examples of teams you might lead as an EM:

• Security Cloud Infrastructure
• Payment Intelligence/ML
• Data Services
• Issuing
• Cash Platform
• Data Services

Stripe’s focus on customers goes beyond a cultural value—they expect EMs and other stakeholders to obtain customer input directly to inform their project planning and execution, and even have EMs conduct internal ‘friction tests’ to ascertain where users might experience product friction.

Your compensation as an EM will depend on your experience, skills, and the role. Here are the salaries for Stripe EMs at each level:

• M0: $478,000
• M1: $636,000
• M2: $911,000
• M3: $1,120,000

Before you apply

• Take time to learn about the timeline of Stripe’s growth, as well as their stated aims. It goes without saying that you should understand the product or service of the team you are applying to, but it’s also important to research any products or teams you might be collaborating with, so you can speak to the steps you’d take to facilitate cross-team projects.
• Go through Stripe’s web offerings, including their culture and operating principles, as well as their engineering blog, to understand the experiences to emphasize during your interview. If you’ve never worked in fintech or financial services, get to know some of the compliance requirements, expectations, and challenges to scaling that fintech firms face to help you speak more confidently. You can also invest in a course tailored to the Stripe hiring process to learn how to showcase your skills and experience in a way that fits their expectations.
• One of the final interview rounds will center around a project you worked on recently, giving you the chance to speak to your challenges, successes, and approach. Look through your recent work and identify good projects, focusing not just on your contributions but on the ways you optimized your team’s performance, managed complexity and collaboration, and any lessons you learned.
• Go through your resume and begin thinking about the path that led you to a leadership role. It’s important to be prepared to speak to why you want to be a manager.

Interview process

As stated above, the interview process has changed significantly in the last few years and will likely continue to change, as is typical at dynamic companies like Stripe. The EM interview process is team-dependent, meaning the questions and stakeholders involved will change depending on the team and level.

For M1 and M2 hires, the process will go as follows:

1. A remote screening call with a recruiter to assess management experience and culture fit
2. An interview with a hiring manager about leadership and people-management skills
3. A final interview loop of 4-5 rounds, depending on the level of the role

1. Recruiter screening

On this call, you will speak with a recruiter about your past and current roles, your experience as a manager, and what attracts you to working at Stripe and to this team or role in particular. This is by no means an in-depth interview, but you can still distinguish yourself by emphasizing your collaborative, dynamic approach to your work.

Some example questions the recruiter might ask are:

• How many years of management experience do you have? How many reports did you have?
• How do you approach projects that require cross-team collaboration?
• Why do you want to work at Stripe?
• What is your approach to managing poor performers on your team?

2. Hiring manager interview

This interview will focus heavily on your past and present as a leader and how you work with your reports to deliver on goals. Performing well in this interview will require you to speak authentically about your approach to team-building, from hiring to team structure to collaboration. Being able to speak directly from experience is critical, so take the time to practice your interviewing skills. Stripe takes pride in having very high standards for their employee performance and goals, and you will need to discuss at length how you assess team skills. Stripe is also a workplace that moves very quickly, spinning projects up and down as priorities change, so speak to how you thrive in this sort of environment.

Some questions the hiring manager might ask you are:

• What kind of things do you value when assessing whether someone is a good fit for your team?
• What are your standards for hiring, and how do you gauge whether someone meets that standard?
• What are the most important engineering manager skills?
• What is an example of a strategic hire you made, and why did you make that hire?

3. Final interview rounds

Strategy and execution interview

This interview focuses on your current team’s mission and goals, and your perspective on how you assess the team’s progress towards that goal. The interviewer will ask you to speak to the importance of your team’s work to the organization as a whole, and how you balance the priorities your team has relative to discrete projects and the goals of the whole organization. A common example of this would be a security team, which has a mandate to protect sensitive information, but which must work with the broader organizational goal of going to market with high-quality and performant products. In this case, you might speak to balancing your security standards against user experience and product development timelines.

Another key point of focus will be roadmaps and how you create them in your current role. You might do so collaboratively with other stakeholders, work with your team to create one, or make one on your own. If you create your roadmap and KPIs collaboratively, you’ll need to speak to that collaboration and any conflicts that arose, as well as how you resolved them. If you worked alone, speak to how you worked with your team and across teams to achieve buy-in from others to illustrate your interpersonal skills.

If you work at a smaller organization or one that’s not highly technical, it may be more challenging to apply some of your work to Stripe’s portfolio of products. However, you can demonstrate that your team was valuable and you were able to advocate for their work and obtain necessary resources from the organization to stand out.

Some questions the interviewer might ask are:

• How did you work with cross-functional teams? Which teams were they?
• How do you balance team and organizational priorities?
• How would you build a high-performance engineering team?
• What is your process for creating a roadmap?
• How do you determine KPIs and assess the quality of your team’s work?
• How do you build credibility with new reports on a team you haven't built yourself?

Experience and goals interview

This is a manager-to-manager interview primarily focused on determining whether the scope of your past and current roles matches the Stripe EM position you’re applying for. It’s important to prepare for this interview by going through your career. The interviewer will want to learn more about what made you change organizations or become a manager. A good way to distinguish yourself is to speak about your enthusiasm for having an impact. For example, show how your career path has followed a goal of increasing impact on your projects and organization.

The scope of your past and current role will be a key determinant here, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to have managed a large team to succeed. Even if your team was made up of 2 or 3 reports, if you can tell a story and give examples of how your team had an outsized impact on the organization you work for, and the role you played in that, you’ll show you are a skilled manager with a strong track record of exceeding expectations. It is also important to describe different problems you faced as a manager, such as underperforming team members, project complexity, or changing priorities. They will want to know how you handled these challenges, what you learned, and what you would have done differently.

While leveling up or down is rare, it does happen occasionally during these rounds. Demonstrate your team’s impact and your significant role in that, show an enthusiasm for perfecting products and for collaboration, and a strong record of thoughtful problem-solving to uplevel from M1 to M2. Managing a team which did not have a major impact on your organization, not having significant management experience, or struggling to speak to your team’s achievements can result in a downlevel.

Some questions you might encounter in this round are:

• What were the key considerations that made you move from role to role or organization to organization?
• How do you manage your team's performance?
• What was the most impactful thing you’ve done, and what made it so impactful?
• How do you advocate for more resources at your organization?
• Describe a situation where you dealt with a complex problem.

Project interview

In this round, an interviewer or group of interviewers will ask you to document a past project or product you worked on, going through the process of how the project began, how the expectations changed, and how it was completed. This interview is primarily meant to gauge your technical skills and your ability to apply them to the project management process; for example, understanding the way different teams need to contribute to the project, when collaborators enter and exit certain parts of the process, and so on.

As with the other interviews, highlight the collaborative aspects of the project as well as your ability to roll with changes. The interviewers may ask you particular questions as you flesh out the document of your work, asking you to explain your decision-making or how you planned to handle scale or security concerns.

System design

While Stripe EMs are not expected to write much code beyond some basic data mining and visualization work, they are expected to be able to handle the highly technical nature of their work and understand the fundamentals of how their team’s projects function. The system design round will test your ability and understanding, and may be split into 2 separate rounds, depending on the management level you are applying for.

You will be asked to design a system and create a diagram of it using a software called Whimsical. The questions will most likely tie into a Stripe product offering, typically one related to something the team you are applying to works on. For example, if you are applying to the Billing team, they may ask you to design a RESTful API similar to one of the ones they use and iterate on. In addition to this, they will want to hear that you understand the general principles of API design, performance assessment, and other components.

Although this round will not involve writing any code, you will need to be able to speak confidently to some key areas of software development and how you might handle common issues like data security, product performance, or being able to scale up successfully.

Some questions you might encounter in the system design round are:

• Design Instagram
• Design Ticketmaster
• Design a ledger service
• Design the SMS API for Twilio
• What is an API and how does it work?
• Design an application performance monitoring system

Additional resources

• Stripe’s engineering and product blogs
• Stripe’s blog
• Jobs at Stripe
• Stripe’s Operating Principles and Culture
• Life at Stripe Page
• Interview Coaching for Stripe
• Stripe Engineering Manager Interview Manager Questions
• Stripe System Design Interview Questions
• Stripe Interview Questions

FAQs

How should I prepare for a Stripe Engineering Manager interview?

If you’re planning to interview for an EM position at Stripe, brush up on your interviewing skills and review interview questions asked at Stripe. It’s also a good idea to look at their blogs and product pages, particularly for the team you are applying to, and to read about the fintech space more broadly to understand the competitive landscape and challenges.

How much do Stripe Engineering Managers make?

According to Levels, EMs at Stripe make the following:

• M0:$478,000
• M1:$636,000
• M2: $911,000
• M3: $1,120,000

Do I need fintech experience to work at Stripe?

Although having direct fintech experience will help you speak to some of Stripe’s primary issues and goals, you do not need fintech experience to get a job as an EM. The primary skills you need are a solid level of experience managing a team and a track record of having a major impact at your organization.

Does Stripe offer internships?

Yes, Stripe offers internships to undergraduate and graduate students. The internships last between 12 and 16 weeks, primarily in San Francisco, Dublin, and Singapore. They open applications for interns in line with academic calendars, usually between August and February. You can learn more about their internships on their Stripe University page and see openings on their job site.

How long is the Stripe Engineering Manager interview process?

According to Glassdoor, the Stripe EM interview process lasts between 3–4 weeks, starting with the recruiter screening call and continuing through rounds of on-site interviews.