I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify (Ottawa, ON) in Jan 2017
Interview
Very very very very very subjective interview process. I don't think your technical background/experience matters. For a tech company, trusting HR to filter out good candidates based on a "life story" or a "talk" about your previous experiences is not smart. I have interviewed multiple times with them, once it was a 5 minute talk about your life and that's that, the second time it was about 45 minutes. Never had any technical questions, or any discussion related to the job at hand.They won't have a clue about your resume when they talk to you. Why? "To make it more organic." Give me a break.
typical interview process, one round with hr. followed by a 75 min coding interview pair programming with one of the engineers. In the coding interview it was encouraged to use ai.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
create a autocomplete system for search based on a list of search frequencies.
There was a first round with hr followed by a 1hour interview, use of AI was encouraged. Interviewer was not very knowledgeable and I had to discover a solution that she understands
The interview was intense and definitely exceeded my expectations. The technical rounds were particularly challenging, but I felt prepared. One of the system design questions was about creating a webhook delivery system with various complexities, and I was relieved because I had explored that exact topic on PracHub just days before. After tackling some coding problems, I faced some behavioral questions that tested my thought process. Overall, the experience was demanding, but I was thrilled to receive an offer, which I happily accepted.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a webhook delivery system that retries on failure with exponential backoff. Cover idempotency, ordering guarantees, dead-letter queues, and how you'd handle a downstream consumer that's been offline for hours.