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Stripe Technical Program Manager (TPM) interview guide
The role of a Stripe Technical Program Manager
Technical Program Managers (TPM) are a vital cog in a company's growth wheel. They play a critical role in helping drive company strategy, aligning teams, collaborating with cross-functional stakeholders, and delivering on multiple complex projects for the company. Given the rapid expansion of companies in the digital space, it has become imperative for companies, especially ones with a large digital footprint, to hire TPMs.
Stripe is an Irish-American financial service and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in San Francisco, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment processing software and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
Role
- Drive the technical future of Stripe’s platform, products and infrastructure, leading cross-functional initiatives, which span the breadth of engineering..
- Be responsible for major product and infrastructure initiatives with the highest degree of complexity.
- Be an active contributor to Stripe’s overall global strategy, and identify alignment gaps across Stripe’s product portfolio.
Skills/Qualifications required
- 7+ years of software engineering, systems engineering or technical product/program management experience.
- Obsessed with quality, reliability & correctness of product/infrastructure architecture
- Having a track record of providing program management during all phases of software development from kick-off to ship, demonstrating critical thinking and thought leadership.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, building strong relationships with stakeholders and teams around the organization.
- Ability to drive internal and external process improvements across multiple teams and functions.
- Experience operating autonomously and leading large-scale efforts across multiple teams and functions, with stakeholders in different disciplines across time zones.
- Analytical and problem-solving experience with large-scale platforms, infrastructure and organizations.
- Experience leading initiatives with a global footprint having built APIs, products, and complex systems/infrastructure at scale.
Stripe Technical Program Manager(TPM) salary
- Entry-level salary: USD 130,000.
- Senior positions: USD 315,000.
- Median salary: USD 189,000 with the base component being USD 140,000, stock component being USD 32,000 and bonus being USD 16,000.
Stripe Technical Program Manager Interview Guide
The interview process for the Stripe Technical Program Manager role consists of 3 stages as under:
- Recruiter Screen (30 minutes)
- Hiring Manager Screen (about 1 hour)
- Onsite round (7 hours)
Recruiter Screen
Overview
It's an exploratory telephonic interview wherein the interviewer will be looking to assess your cultural and experiential fit for the role at the company. The interviewer is likely to ask questions regarding your background and previous work experience in the relevant domain, and may also discuss previous projects you have handled. Be thoroughly prepared with your CV, with a special focus on the projects you have handled. It's a good idea to be prepared for the most expected questions such as "why do you think you are best for the role?" or "why should we hire you?"
Hiring Manager Screen
Overview
The Hiring Manager Screen is your interview with the hiring manager. This interview is roughly of 1-hour duration. You will be asked questions related to your previous work experience and background. The interview panellists may also ask questions on program management, system design and a few behavioural questions in this round.
Tips
- Practice a lot of system design/architecture design questions, especially around designing financial services software
- For program management questions, do some research on the company's goals/growth road map, current projects and products.
Interview Questions
Most asked interview questions in the Phone Screen
Program Management
- How do you deal with underperforming team members?
- Let us know how you approach the execution of a project.
- Have you handled multiple teams within a program?
- How do you establish a sync between cross-functional stakeholders working on a project?
System design
- Design the front end of a low level payment processing app such as Paytm
- Tell us the basic design elements of a database schema for a certain configuration manager
- Tell me 3 ways to improve your favourite app
Behavioural questions
- As a Technical Program Manager, what is the toughest decision you have had to make?
- Have you ever been in disagreement with the entire team? How was the situation resolved?
- How do you motivate your team members?
Want to practice more such questions with a Stripe TPM?
→ Book now!Onsite Round
Overview
The onsite interview is a full day event. It consists of 4-5 interviews, each lasting for about an hour. The interview panel consists of a Stripe Product Manager, Technical Program Manager, Software Developer, Software Development Manager, and the Hiring Manager. Questions in this round are generally asked from the following areas:
- Program Sense
- System Design
- Cross-functional partnership
- Behavioural
Interview Questions
Program Sense
- Explain Agile Methodology. Tell us your experience on planning/tracking multiple projects
- You have 10 testers and 1 developer with a solution to be deployed on 1 lead platform followed by deploying the same on 10 subsequent platforms. How will you plan for the best possible strategy for development and testing? What are the risks in each?
- Tell us how you managed to make a client cooperate.
- What do you understand by Scrum?
- How do you handle a difficult customer who is upset and not listening?
- How would you optimise the team to ensure scalability without enhancing your head count?
- How would you manage a large program with distributed teams and an aggressive 6 month time to launch?
System Design
- Draw the technical architectural diagram of a ticketing system?
- How will you plan for an online grocery system?
- How would you design a website that gathers movie ratings from multiple sites on the web and shows the average rating?
- Can you design a mobile phone for 3-6 years old kids?
- Design the front end of a payment processing system.
Cross-functional partnership
- Tell me some examples of projects where people sought you out for advice and where you sought others out for advice?
- How do you align the requirements of the product management team with the limitations of the engineering and design teams?
- Do you like unquestioning stakeholders? Why or why not?
Behavioural questions
- Have you ever worked on a project where goals were ambiguous and changing? How did you go about it?
- Have you ever resolved a conflict in your team? Tell us more.
- Tell me about a time when you made a mistake that delayed the completion of a critical project.
- How do you respond to difficult feedback from your superiors?
Being the most complex of all the rounds, the onsite round requires you to present your best self in the interview. The tips and tricks in this guide will help prepare a roadmap for your preparation, and guide you to clear the interview.
Thanks for reading!
All the best!