You probably already recognize this is an operational question. Interviewers at Stripe use operational questions to determine how you go about doing the work of an integration engineer. They are also interested in whether your processes and procedures match those currently used by their organization. This latter point is important because it will minimize the amount of time it takes to onboard you and have you begin contributing to Stripe's organization's objectives.

"There are several ways to improve the performance of a data integration process. These include using array fetch size, ordering the joins, and extracted data minimizing. Other techniques I have used include locale conversion minimization, setting target-based options to optimize the performance, and data type conversion minimization. All of these will improve data throughput. My research indicates that Stripe currently uses many of these same techniques."