I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Shopify (Ottawa, ON) in Feb 2017
Interview
The interview was a very invasive "Life Story" style interview, which asked about my childhood, current status, opinions of people I have met, and so on. Then a technical life story interview was an informal chat about what I was doing currently. There was no structure to it, other than what could be inferred out of these informal life story chats. I didn't make it to the subsequent steps, without any explanation, but likely due to the fact that the interviewer didn't like my Life Story.
The technical interviewer was more concerned about the battery life in his laptop than actually learning about me. With 15 minutes remaining, he said to me "I have 3% battery life left, do you want to ask anything in the remaining 3%?" Completely unprofessional.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tell me about your childhood, where did you grow up and what kinds of things did you do and enjoy?
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.
