I studied economics in college and fell into programming through building financial models in Excel that eventually needed real code. Started with VBA, moved to Python, then to full stack development.

Before Stripe, I spent 4 years at Plaid working on the banking integrations team. This domain knowledge was crucial for the Stripe interview.

Stripe's interview process is uniquely practical. Instead of abstract algorithm puzzles, they give you real-world problems that mirror actual work. One round had me debug a failing webhook delivery system. Another asked me to design an API versioning strategy.

The staff-level expectations were high. They wanted to see not just technical depth but also leadership and cross-team coordination experience. I talked about leading the migration from REST to gRPC at Plaid, which involved coordinating across 5 teams.

The take-home project was about building a payment retry system. Spent about 6 hours on it. The review session was more interesting than the code itself - we discussed production tradeoffs, monitoring strategies, and how to handle edge cases that my initial implementation missed.

Comp was excellent. The equity component was larger than I expected. Stripe offers tend to be more equity-heavy compared to other companies at this level.

Domain expertise in payments was definitely my biggest advantage. If you're interested in fintech, build deep knowledge in one area rather than surface-level knowledge in many.

1. Domain expertise can compensate for lack of traditional CS education.
2. Stripe's interview is practical. Practice building real systems, not just solving puzzles.
3. At staff level, articulating WHY you made decisions matters more than WHAT you built.
4. Have strong opinions loosely held. Stripe values clear thinking over stubbornness.
5. Read about distributed systems in the context of payments specifically.