I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify in Sept 2020
Interview
The interview process is public and it is encouraged you get familiar with the process to be well prepared. Overall, it was a good experience because from my experience, the interviewers are thoughtful and want you to succeed. Some negatives about the process is that it can take a while because there are a lot of interviews and that if you are using a coding language that the interviewer is not familiar with, they may derail the interview by asking questions about the language instead of focusing on the "pair programming" aspect of solving the problem.
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.