I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify in Mar 2016
Interview
I got contacted by HR for an on site chat, which they call "life story" You go there (or on Skype), you will be asked to give the whole story of your life. At this stage, there is nothing fear but for some reason, some people don't get a call afterwards. Which makes you start questioning their process. After this step, I got a call for an onsite interview which is pair-programming. They told me that they will contact me in a week ,no matter the answer is. After a week, I haven't received an email so I sent one asking to give me an update. The super busy recruiter took two days to digest the email and responded me that I will get a call from them on the same day. They didn't call so I followed up with another email. They responded that they will call me this time, "certainly". They didn't call so I followed up an email stating that I understand what's happening and thanked for their time THEN they called to tell me that they moved on with other candidates.
It is not about having a cheesy draw the .. owl motto, or shooting videos to show how nice the hiring process is. Instead, respect your candidates' time and give them a response regardless of the decision. We get it, sometimes people don't fit and don't get the job. It is part of the game but not respecting their time, it just describes the inner mechanisms of the company so I guess I dodged a bullet.
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.
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify (Toronto, ON)
Interview
Lots of rounds and meeting multiple team members enjoyable experience and the interviews really ensure that the job is a right fit. There are multiple checkpoints to ensure both parties are on the same page
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Walk through a past technical project you worked on or owned.
Interview process went quickly. The recruiter was very responsive and nice, and made the whole experience 10 times better. The interviewers did not ask impossible questions and focused more on the thought process than the correct answer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first 2 interviews were LeetCode-like questions. Not directly from leetcode, but if you know your data structures you'll be good. 3rd interview I had to prep a design document and share it and they asked questions about the decisions that were made and the rationale behind it.