Stripe is a powerhouse in the online world, making it easier for businesses to handle online payments and money matters. It’s like a behind-the-scenes hero for websites that want to make sure buying and selling online is smooth and secure. But to make the most of what Stripe offers, you need to hire the right tech whizzes — those special developers who know how to weave Stripe’s tools into a website’s fabric.
If you’re on the lookout for such a talent, the interview is your moment to spot the right one. It’s not just about finding someone who can code; it’s about finding a developer who gets the big picture of online payments and can fit into your company culture. Then for sure, you got the right fit.
We’ve put together an article that’s packed with steps you need to take in the hiring process and the kind of questions you should ask in the interview to figure out if a developer is the right fit for working with Stripe. These questions are straightforward and designed for anyone to use, whether you’re a hiring manager or a developer looking to fill a Stripe role.
By the end, you’ll be ready to pick a Stripe developer who can help make your payments safe and functional.
What is the Role of a Stripe Developer
When it comes to powering the financial transactions of an online platform, the role of a Stripe developer cannot be overstated. Simply put, they integrate Stripe’s payment services into websites and apps, ensuring secure and efficient online transactions.
To truly excel, a Stripe developer must show a blend of technical proficiency and strategic insight. This means they not only wield the tools of their trade—such as programming languages and API integration—with expertise but also align their technical solutions with the broader business goals.
As such, here are the skills for stripe developers to look for:
- Familiarity with Stripe and proficiency with its APIs: This one is a no-brainer. You’ll want someone that is both knowledgeable and comfortable with the service and its many features and functionalities. This is important not only to perform their day-to-day tasks but also to help the rest of the development team and advise on best practices and courses of action when implementing features in your projects. When it comes to Stripe APIs, your candidate should know exactly which endpoints to use to solve any need that may arise during development.
- Proficiency with at least one programming language supported by Stripe: Stripe APIs can be accessed with many languages, including Ruby, Python, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, and .NET. Make sure your candidate is proficient in a language that can access it. This should ideally coincide with the language of your project, but this is not always possible. In those cases, research which language would be preferable to use.
- Familiarity with database technology: This will depend on the project you’ll want to integrate Stripe into, but your candidate should be comfortable with both SQL and NoSQL databases and methods to manipulate them.
- Knowledgeable of the best practices when handling financial information and payments: Although Stripe takes care of the payment portion of a user’s transaction, it’s still up to the receiving party to store and keep that information securely on their end. Being the primary handler of this information, this responsibility falls onto your Stripe developer.
How to Hire a Stripe Developer?
The hiring process can take many forms and adapt based on the needs of the hiring company, but with these simple steps, you can’t go wrong.
1. Posting The Job With A Good Description
Before the interviews, it’s important to make an accurate and enticing job description to attract candidates. Be clear in the expectations you have of the developer you’re hiring. Include:
- A comprehensive overview of the kind of solution the integration will be performed in.
- What technologies and languages should the developer be familiar with?
- What kind of API usage the integration will involve?
- The longevity and remuneration expectations of the job.
2. Pre-screening with a Recruiter
A process where you screen your candidates to see if they are good fits for the company. This is a good time to get a feel for how the candidate behaves with other people. You’ll get other opportunities to do this later and in more accurate contexts, but it’s better to determine which people won’t be good fits right away, both to avoid leading them on and to make you lose your team’s time.
Technical Interview: This is where you’ll want to test your candidate’s overall technical knowledge, analytical skills, and familiarity with Stripe as a platform. You’ll want to get a feel for what they know and what they can do without going into very specific detail. In case two candidates distinguish themselves equally at this stage, the next step will usually be enough to find a clear better fit. Important things to consider at this stage include:
- Have a senior developer available to conduct your technical interviews: If you have a technically literate recruiter, even better (as you won’t have to take precious time away from the development team). It’s important to have a person capable of talking to recruits in technical terms and evaluating their answers.
- Initial Phone Screening: Conduct a 30-minute video interview to gauge the candidate’s communication skills and preliminary technical knowledge. This step helps in identifying candidates who can articulate their experience and skills effectively, saving time in the later stages of the interview process.
- Hands-On Coding Exercise: For Stripe developers, tailor the hands-on exercise to reflect Stripe integration tasks. If they’re front-end focused, provide a mockup and a container with a REST API for them to integrate Stripe payment functionalities
- Standardized Interview Questions: Ensure all interviewers ask the same technical questions during the hands-on exercise. This consistency helps reduce bias and provides a uniform basis for evaluating all candidates.
- Pre-Interview Preparation Email: Send candidates a detailed preparation email, outlining the interview process, the hands-on exercise expectations, and any necessary tools or environments (like Docker) they need to set up beforehand. Make it clear that coming unprepared (e.g., without a laptop ready for coding) can negatively impact their evaluation.
- Assessment of Practical Skills: Evaluate the candidate based on their ability to make progress in the allotted time, their problem-solving approach, and how well they understand and implement Stripe-related functionalities. Focus on their coding style, understanding of Stripe’s APIs, error handling, and security considerations in payment processing.
3. Test for Soft Skills and Make Final Decision
Make hiring decisions based not only on technical skills but also on how well the candidate’s approach aligns with the team’s working style and company culture.
4. Onboarding
Although the person is already hired, don’t feel like they are guaranteed. You’ll want them to feel welcomed and a key part of the process. A good onboarding strategy is crucial to start on the right foot and keep your developers happy.
9 Essential Questions to Ask When Interviewing Your Stripe Developer
When dealing with developers for Stripe, design interview questions so that they demonstrate not only their knowledge of the platform but also how to integrate it successfully into a working application. Here are 5 stripe interview questions to prepare your recruiters and find the best stripe developer among your candidates:
1. What would you say are the most important principles in software engineering?
What are you testing? This question is mainly to test the candidate’s knowledge of software engineering overall. Common answers here are better requirement analysis, simplicity, modularity, reusability, planning before doing, and continuous documentation.
Pay attention if the answer specifically mentions and goes into detail about values that the rest of your development team shares. This will highly depend on what the business prioritizes, but you’ll generally want someone that aligns with the core values of the other employees.
2. How would you integrate Stripe into our software?
What are you testing? This is a question to evaluate the candidate’s ability to correctly plan and prioritize work. Time management and critical thinking are essential here. You want someone that understands the business of your app and can correctly predict the most important systems to implement first for an app of the nature your company is developing.
3. Given a collection of payment entries, what strategy would you employ to find a specific entry?
What are you testing? Besides a correct snippet of code, you’ll want to watch out for attention to detail or a particularly ingenious or performant solution. Your candidate should constantly find ways to improve the search and retrieval of entries, as that can be one of the biggest slowdowns of payment systems.
4. How would you design a system to store a large number of payment entries?
What are you testing? This a follow-up to the previous question. In this case, you want to know if your candidate has the architecture skills and knowledge to engineer a solution that is both robust and stable. Of particular note, you’ll want to know what kinds of systems they’d develop to overcome common payment problems such as entry retrieval, redundancy, and removal.
5. How would you improve [this payment method]?
What are you testing? You’ll want someone that can analyze and find points of improvement in the payment system overall, not just entry management. A good eye for highlighting possible issues and improving processes is a huge point in favor of the candidate, as payment systems are some of the most crucial elements in apps.
6. Explain how you would set up a payment system that needs to support multiple currencies and tax regulations.
What are you testing? In setting up a payment system for multiple currencies and tax regulations, the aim is to test a candidate’s ability to scrutinize and refine the system comprehensively. It’s crucial to have a developer who can identify not just superficial issues but also deep-seated inefficiencies within the payment processing workflow.
7. How do you ensure that a Stripe integration is compliant with PCI DSS requirements?
What are you testing? This question tests their understanding of compliance standards and their capability to implement solutions that adhere to these regulations without compromising functionality.
A candidate should articulate a clear strategy for using Stripe’s built-in tools, such as Stripe Elements, which are optimized for PCI compliance, as they handle sensitive payment information without it ever touching the servers of the business.
8. Test their Cultural Fit and Soft Skills
When assessing a candidate, the cultural fit and soft skills are a key part of the interview process. You want to see their approach to communication and team collaboration and their capacity to engage effectively and constructively with the rest of the team. This involves evaluating their interpersonal skills and their ability to contribute to a positive and productive team dynamic.
Questions to ask:
- Describe a situation where effective communication within your team led to a successful project outcome.
- How do you handle disagreements with a colleague regarding a technical approach to a project?
- The fintech industry is rapidly evolving. How do you stay updated with the latest innovations and apply them to your work?
- Can you give an example of a time when you had to learn a new technology or process quickly for a project? How did you manage that?
Finding Stripe Developers: A Global Search Strategy
Why search for your next expert worldwide? Looking locally is worse than being an option; it’s setting yourself up for disappointment in most cases due to its limitations. If you hire globally, you have access to a vast talent pool not to mention, the cost benefits when you’re hiring in countries with a lower cost of living.
There are three main ways to find your ideal global Stripe developer:
- Freelancers
- Partnering up with a Recruitment Agency
- Partnering up with an Outsource Company
Each comes with advantages and disadvantages that you should be aware of. Let’s take a brief overview of all three:
1. Freelancers
Freelance agents are people who hold no ties to any one company. They will take a job (and, depending on their schedule, more than one at a time), finish it, and move on. Due to the nature of their work, they make themselves easy to find to their would-be customers. They can usually be found in professional social networks such as LinkedIn and specialized networks such as Upwork.
Advantages
- You can be extremely specific and find a person tailored to your needs
- There’s less hassle involved, and the person can start working right away
- They are usually a cheaper option
Disadvantages
- Finding the right person for the project can take a very long time
- The quality of their work is not assured
- You have to manage the person, both in terms of work and HR
- It can be a risky proposition for projects that involve sensitive data (which is a given since we’re dealing with a payment system in Stripe)
Best used in Small, short-lived projects.
2. Remote Recruiting Agencies
Recruiting agencies like DistantJob help businesses connect with their curated network of experienced developers. They help businesses by finding full-time employees that not only fit the job description but are also good cultural fits.
Advantages
- Recruiters are trained in the technologies their clients work in, and thus are much more capable of finding and assessing the best candidates that fit the bill of their clients
- Since recruiters maintain a vast database of experts, you’ll get a curated list of candidates specific to your needs in a short amount of time
- Recruiting Agencies will take care of all the needed paperwork for you and can help you with the onboarding process
- As an employee, you’ll have direct access to them and have more control over what they do and when.
- Mention the staffing services such as managing the remote workforce for them and taking care of the payroll
Disadvantages
- You have to pay for the recruitment services, but their prices are usually competitive enough that employing them is more affordable than if you were recruiting by yourself
Best used in Long-term projects, or lots of small-scale projects in succession.
3. Outsourcing
In this case, you hire people to work for you for a project or a limited time, and they will perform the job as per the contract. When the contract ends, the team is then free to take another contract. The key difference from remote work, however, is the fact that these people work for an agency and thus should have more accountability.
Advantages
- You get a qualified person (or, more commonly, a team of people) ready to work for you very quickly
- Staff Augmentation Agencies will take care of all the employee paperwork for you (since they are still their employees)
- Depending on the project’s timeframe, it may be a cheaper option than hiring people outright
Disadvantages
- The quality of their work is not assured.
- If you’re hiring a team, you won’t have direct access to them and must instead mediate through a project manager on the agency’s end.
- You’ll need to review the contract with lawyers, so you’ll have to pay for those costs if you don’t have a legal team.
Best used in: A long-term project or a short project that requires a long period of post-launch support.
Conclusion
Now you know how to ace a Stripe interview and find the people you need for your projects! Finding a Stripe developer is one thing, but finding one that not only knows Stripe but fits your project and team is quite another. This is why their recruitment process is critical to finding the best person for the job.
If you’re struggling to hire an expert Stripe developer, DistantJob is here to help! We’ve already stated why recruitment agencies are a good option to find the developers you need, but let us make the case as to why DistantJob is the best agency to help you find your future employees:
- We’re efficient: We employ a team of recruiters with more than 10 years of experience screening tech candidates for our clients. We can save you time and money by finding the people you need for any of your projects in as little as two weeks. We also take care of all the paperwork for you and can even help you with the onboarding process if you’d like.
- You get the best in the world: We have a vast network of people from all over the world at our disposal, which means that we don’t stop until we find the best candidates for you. And believe us; we know they’re out there. You’ll get the best fit for your needs.
- You’ll get (and keep!) the right people for your business: We not only find people qualified for the job positions you ask for, but we also take into account a future employee’s cultural fit. This is an extremely important factor that improves employee happiness while working for you, bringing three main advantages: You get an employee that 1) Is more productive, 2) Has better communication and collaboration with the rest of your dev team, and 3) Is more resistant to leaving the company.
- We’re flexible: As recruiters, we can be employed as needed, and you can scale our efforts (and the payment!) up or down depending on your current needs.
If you’re still set on using your HR department for recruitment but have noticed they could use some training, then we can still help you! We can train your HR staff with the right tech knowledge to conduct Stripe interviews successfully and find you the developers you need!
Interested? Contact us today! You can do so through our online hiring form or visit us at our office in Montreal!
