I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify (Montreal, QC) in Apr 2017
Interview
The first interview was a phone screen with HR. He asked about my experience and gave a brief description about the roles they were looking to fill.
The follow-up interview was a skype call with the same HR rep to discuss my "Life Story." This was an unusual approach to interviewing a candidate. While I appreciate the rep's explanation that this prevents "B.S." answers to stock questions, it is difficult to sum up one's life in 15 to 30 minutes without much indication from the rep if they're hearing relevant information (nor much indication with regards to what counts as "relevant"). The process was pleasant, but tricky to navigate. My general sense from this experience is that the answers didn't matter much as long as the rep liked you and your career path (i.e., "life story"?) somewhat matched the position's description. But this is only my guess. It was a deeply opaque approach to interviewing, an undertaking which is already inscrutable for the most part.
The interviews were for a technical role but said interviews did not involve any technical discussions besides the listing of technologies used (little more than buzzwords). I was disappointed not to have been able to talk shop with developers, or at least to take on some technical challenge, before receiving a final answer from the rep despite having gone two interviews deep.
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.