I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify in Mar 2025
Interview
Shopify has a pretty strange interview loop. It’s not the process that is that weird. The process is similar to every other Silicon Valley company in 2025, but note that Shopify is a Canadian company and most Canadian tech companies don’t use a SV interview. But it’s mostly standard, albeit with quirky names: a recruiter screen (Life Story), a coding exercise (Pair Programming), an interview describing a past project (Technical Deep Dive), and a systems design session (Technical Problem Solving). I guess it was a little strange that they used Criteria to administer an online IQ test (Universal Cognitive Aptitude Test) and personality test (Employee Personality Profile).
The really strange part is when the recruiter started off our conversation by sending a candidate guide that they described as “spicy” and asked a lot of questions to ensure I understood the controversial opinions that Shopify holds. On one hand, I’m sure it scares away candidates. But on the other hand, Shopify is an e-commerce platform, so their stance of encouraging entrepreneurship at all costs makes sense. You’ll also get to read a CEO letter that is super exciting when you’re 25, but contains some worrying ideas that you won’t notice because you’re 25. Shopify really wants you to understand what you’re signing up for, since they only want a certain kind of employee. There is a reason they call it the Tobi Tornado.
In the end, I didn’t click with one of the interviewers and they chose to pass.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Can you show up at least 40% better every year to qualify for your current job? Can you hold yourself and your teams to this standard?
Implement a Datasource class that looks like a Pandas dataframe. You should be able to map and filter over it, before collecting the results: Datasource([1, 2, 3]).map(lambda x: x*2).filter(lambda x: x%2 == 0).collect()
Design a system for a rare book library to keep track of the condition of their books using a book scanner to photograph the state of each returned book.
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.