John got an offer as a Software engineer at Stripe

Name John Z

New Position Software engineer at Stripe

Location Remote, USA

Date of Offer March 2022

Coaching Sessions 4

What most excites you about your new job?

The scale and breadth of Stripe's product offering. And that I'll be building highly available systems.

Where were you previously?

Lyft

What was your preparation strategy?

I prepared during roughly 2 months, averaging 5-10 hours per week. This consisted of: - Doing some Leetcode to increase my speed on programming problems. - Thinking through examples from my experience to use in experience interviews. - Listening to YouTube talks from Amazon principal engineers on what's required to operate at Staff+. - Practicing design interviews, reviewing docs for all the AWS systems I've used in the past, memorizing the tradeoffs that come with each of them. Finally, I did some mock system design interviews with IGotAnOffer.

What was the hardest part of the whole interview process?

Finding the right coach to help me see my blind spots. IGotAnOffer was the golden ticket in that regard.

Did any of the interview questions stand out?

System design questions range from highly constrained, to completely open-ended, and from billions in scale with global distribution down to the one I got, which was designing a room reservation system for just one hotel. With such variation, I think it's difficult to prepare for all of these effectively.