I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Shopify (Ottawa, ON)
Interview
Long, respectful interviewers, but can be tiring and boring
It was a very long procedure. I interviewed with two teams.
They have the Life Story interview where you meet an HR representative. I found it quite creative to call this way, but there was nothing special about it. I interviewed with two teams, so I had to do this interview twice.
Everyone in Shopify loves working for Shopify - this shows that the management is doing an extremely amazing job. ... Everyone talks great about Shopify. Listening to this in each interview (I had about 8 interviews) can become quite boring.
The interviewers (and the whole process) are very respectful. They asked me many questions about what I do in my current job (and previous ones).
The technical questions (tests) are easy. I do not see how it is possible to judge a senior developer by asking them these questions.
Technically, however, some interviewers were not very strong in my opinion - from the discussions we had. -- but they were certainly creative and have the material of creating interesting products and features.
In total, I had one screening interview by phone, an interview with two team developers by Skype (no detailed technical questions there), a Life Story interview, another Life Story interview, another interview with a software developer (no detailed technical questions). Then, I had 4 on-site interviews (two of them were programming), and lunch with an HR representative.
In general, Shopify is good and it will be better in the near future.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Simple database questions , simple programming tasks (no need to prepare for Algorithms questions).
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.