I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify (Ottawa, ON) in Apr 2015
Interview
On the screening phone call we discussed my background and what I would like to do in Shopify. After that I was invited for an interview onsite to discuss my open source projects. It was a weird experience of chatting with an HR who asked me personal questions about my school years, sports and lifestyle for most of the hour. We briefly looked at the code but she was more interested in psychological profiling than assessing the actual skills.
The interview might been a hint of the extent to which the corporate culture intrudes into personal life.
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.