Stripe is a leading payment infrastructure provider, allowing online companies to focus on the inner workings of their business and leave things like payments, financial management, and banking to a trusted platform.
Stripe provides powerful tools through their APIs, but you’ll need a developer with expertise in the ecosystem to take full advantage of them. Hiring one is a challenging feat, however. To get the best developer possible, you’ll have to search the right places and elaborate a stripe interview process that can tell you if your candidate is right for the job. But how to do that? Which stripe interview questions should you ask?
In this article, we’ll present you with the info on how to hire a stripe developer, along with some interview questions to help you choose the best candidate possible.
Why Is Hiring a Stripe Developer Important For Your Business?
Any business needs cash flow to stay afloat, and Stripe provides a (relatively) easy and straightforward way for developers to add payments within their digital products, such as websites or applications. It can easily process payments and send invoices, all while preventing common security issues such as fraud. And that’s not all. If you need physical payment solutions or to issue physical cards, Stripe also offers products to help in these matters, meaning you can easily expand and grow your business should you so desire or require.
To provide these services, Stripe has a powerful and comprehensive collection of APIs for developers to take advantage of. But someone not familiar with them can easily make mistakes or lose a lot of time looking for the right endpoints for what they want to do.
If you want to integrate Stripe into your digital goods and services, you’ll want to have an expert on your development team that can not only brave the minutia of these APIs effortlessly and know exactly what to use in any given situation but also avoid common mistakes and pitfalls when integrating Stripe in.
A regular developer can eventually learn the inner workings of Stripe, given time, of course. But that is a luxury few businesses have. If you need results quickly, hiring a certified Stripe developer is the way to go.
What Skills Should You Look For In A Stripe Developer?
Hiring a Stripe developer by itself is not enough. You’ll need to find a good fit that can easily answer the needs of your projects. 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.
What is in the Stripe Interview Process?
The stripe interview process can take many forms and adapt based on the needs of the hiring company, but it usually involves these steps:
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.
- Prepare a battery of questions pertinent to the job’s requirements: Depending on the app and the Stripe integrations it needs, you’ll want your questions to help evaluate if your candidate is ready to face those challenges.
- Coding Interview: While in the technical interview, you’re evaluating the candidate’s overall knowledge of Stripe and any other pertinent skills needed for the job; a coding challenge is there to further test their skills in an environment close to what they would face in their day-to-day working at the company. 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 off on the right foot and keeping your developers happy.
5 Stripe Coding Interview Questions
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.
Where To Find Stripe Developers? Search for Them Globally
If you want to hire a Stripe expert, the most important step is knowing where to find them. Gone are the days when you had to look locally for a developer. With the advancements in internet communication and collaboration, and especially the recent COVID pandemic, remote work has become a viable possibility for IT work.
This gives companies far more flexibility when it comes time to land a developer fit for the job. Strip development is far more niche than a generic language programmer, so finding them isn’t as easy. Looking locally is worse than being an option; it’s setting yourself up for disappointment in most cases.
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.
Recruit The Best Stripe Developers To Work For You With DistantJob
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 developer to implement Stripe in your app, 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!
