Be Stripe's Golang expert shaping SDKs that carry 80%+ of Stripe's payment volume

Stripe is hiring a backend engineer for its Developer SDKs team, which maintains open-source SDKs across seven languages plus an in-house code generation framework powering docs, Stripe Shell, and the SDKs themselves. The role requires deep Golang expertise plus working Node.js skill to improve the codegen pipeline, and real influence over Stripe's API design process. Expect the interview to probe idiomatic API/SDK design, codegen tooling tradeoffs, and cross-team collaboration on API authoring.

Practice this interview

Free · a live voice mock calibrated to this exact role

Start the mock interview

What this interview tests

Idiomatic Golang API/library design
Code generation framework design (SDKs, docs, CLI from one spec)
API design process and cross-team collaboration on API authoring
Open-source maintenance and community support
OpenAPI spec / protobuf familiarity (nice-to-have)

Common question themes

Design an idiomatic Go client for a paginated, versioned REST API — how do you handle errors, retries, and backward compatibility?

How would you architect a code generation framework that produces SDKs in seven languages plus doc snippets and CLI commands from one source of truth?

A product team wants to ship a new API shape that doesn't translate well into a clean SDK method — how do you push back or guide the design?

Walk through how you'd triage and prioritize a backlog of GitHub issues on a widely-used open-source SDK.

What's your experience with PHP, Ruby, or other Stripe SDK languages, and how would you contribute across languages you don't specialize in?

How candidates describe it

Real Backend Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

Google · Backend Software EngineerNo offer

Google Backend Engineer Interview Experience: Bangalore Onsite (Rejected)

A rejected Google Backend Engineer candidate in Bangalore recounts a recruiter screen, a gating elimination round, and a three-round onsite loop covering trees, tries, scheduling, and graph problems.

Interviewed April 2021 · Bangalore, India

Google · L3 Software EngineerOffer

Google L3 software engineer interview: phone screen, four coding rounds, and the Googleyness round

A candidate with two years of experience went from recruiter outreach to offer over about four months. The onsite was four 45-minute coding rounds — three of them featuring binary trees — and one round turned into a 25-minute chain of follow-ups about approximating an optimal solution at scale.

Interviewed June 2020 · Bangalore, IN

Google · L4 Software EngineerNo offer

Google L4 Software Engineer Interview: Eight Rounds, No Offer

An L4 Software Engineer candidate went through two phone screens, three onsite rounds, a culture conversation, and a team-matching call with a Google hiring manager, then watched the process stall for about a month and a half over a tightened experience requirement before an added extended round ended without an offer.

Interviewed February 2024 · Not specified

View the original posting

All Stripe Backend Engineer interviews

All Stripe interviews