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
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.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Shopify with 2.5 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 50% positive. To compare, the company-average is 45.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 28 days to get hired, when considering 62 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Shopify overall takes an average of 33 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Shopify as a Software Engineer according to 62 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 28%
One on one interview: 25%
Skills test: 13%
Presentation: 10%
IQ intelligence test: 6%
Background check: 5%
Personality test: 5%
Group panel interview: 3%
Drug test: 3%
Other: 2%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -