bridge.xyz

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Bridge is a stablecoin infrastructure company that provides APIs enabling businesses to store, move, and accept stablecoin payments across borders. It was acquired by Stripe in 2025 and is known for simplifying the integration of stablecoin-based financial services for developers and enterprises.

4 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

bridge.xyz·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at Bridge.Xyz for a software engineer role, focused entirely on building an email/password auth service from scratch. No scaling tricks, just get the security fundamentals right. Trickier than it sounds.

Design a basic email and password authentication service supporting user sign-up and login, without using any third-party identity providers.
How should passwords be stored securely, and why can't you just use a standard hash like SHA-256?
How do you manage login state after a user authenticates, and what are the tradeoffs between opaque session tokens and JWTs?
What is user enumeration and how do you prevent it, including the timing side channel?
How would you handle 'log out from all devices' and force re-login after a password change?
Where would email verification and password reset flows attach to this design, and what new tables or tokens would they require?

“Big open-ended question to start.”

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bridge.xyz·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026

System design round at bridge.xyz for a software engineer role, focused entirely on building an auth service from scratch with no third-party OAuth allowed. Pretty meaty for a single question but it covered a lot of ground fast.

Design a simple authentication service that handles user sign-up and login, built entirely in-house without relying on any external auth providers.

“Covered the API layer first since that felt most concrete.”

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bridge.xyz·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Got a technical phone screen for a Software Engineer role at Bridge.Xyz. Single coding question, file path normalization, felt straightforward on the surface but there are enough edge cases to trip you up if you're not careful.

Given an absolute Unix-style file path as a string, implement a function that returns its canonical normalized form. Handle dots, double dots, consecutive slashes, and trailing slashes correctly.

“Stack-based approach is the right call here.”

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bridge.xyz·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Coding round at bridge.xyz for a software engineer role. One question, file path simplification, which sounds like a warmup but has enough edge cases to trip you up if you're not careful about the stack logic.

Given an absolute Unix-style file path string, return the simplified canonical path. Handle '.', '..', consecutive slashes, and trailing slashes correctly. Walk through test cases and discuss time/space complexity.

“I went straight to a stack and split on '/' which is the right call, but I fumbled the edge cases for a bit.”

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