Hot spot formation is very important issue in a heat exchanger integrated microchannel reactor for steam reforming of methane. Rapid temperature increase was observed near the inlet because reaction rate of catalytic combustion was very high near the inlet. In this study, catalytic combustion layer with stripe configuration was proposed to prevent hot spot formation. 2D steady state numerical simulation was conducted using Fluent 14. The configuration of stripe was optimized by using response surface methodology. As a result, the hot spot was disappeared near the inlet without any conversion loss. The maximum temperature of the optimized stripe combustion catalyst layer was 145 K lower than the uniform combustion catalyst layer. The optimized stripe combustion catalyst layer showed about 6.0% smaller surfaceaveraged particle diameter than the uniform combustion catalyst layer.