I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Shopify (Ottawa, ON) in Jul 2020
Interview
I applied at Shopify in late April and received an invite to chat about a month later. The first interview was a quick 15-30 minute chat about why I wanted to work at Shopify, why I wanted to leave my current employer, etc. After the call, I received an invite to schedule two additional meetings: a “life story” interview and a “coding exercise”.
The life story interview was pretty straight forward, you talk about your life and experiences and how you ended up where you are now. After that was the coding exercise which was just over an hour long and revolved around creating multiple algorithms required to apply discount prices to a store checkout.
After those interviews, I waited about 8 days before being invited to 3 additional interviews: the deep dive, coding exercise 2 and coding exercise 3. The deep dive interview involved talking about projects that I was proud of and challenges I overcame while working on them. I suggest that you prepare beforehand with information about the project so that you can talk for the full +1h interview. The coding challenges are similar to the initial exercise, you are given a problem and they give you about 1h to solve it.
After this, I waited about 7 days before being invited to a call where they told me that they would be making an offer. I was able to talk to the team lead prior to signing anything which helped me learn if the position was a good fit for me.
Overall the process was long but very professional and friendly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Why do you want to work for Shopify?
- What are some projects that you've worked on?
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.