Shopify’s Interview Process & Questions

The info below is based on conversations with Shopify engineers.

Shopify's Interview Process for Software Engineers: 4 Steps

Mid to senior-level engineers interviewing at Shopify can expect the following process:

• Recruiter call (30 minutes)
• AI-assisted coding screen (1 hour)
• "Life Story" interview (1 hour)
• Onsite (3-4 hours)

Shopify’s process is decentralized, which means that you interview for a specific team out of the gate.

AI Usage

AI use is not just permitted at Shopify, it's expected. There are two AI-assisted coding rounds in the process: one at the screening stage and one during the onsite. Both follow the same format. You bring your own IDE and your own AI tools. The expectation is that you're directing the AI throughout, making the architectural decisions yourself and using AI to implement them. Reviewing and cleaning up what the AI produces is part of what they're evaluating.

Step 1: Recruiter Call

This is a typical recruiter call, but shorter. It’s primarily meant to gauge your interest in Shopify and lay out the rest of the process. There will be a more detailed recruiter call, called the “Life Story” interview, later on.

That said, it’s still really important not to reveal your salary expectations or your salary history. We wrote a detailed post about salary negotiation that lays out exactly what to say when recruiters pressure you to name the first number. Just don’t do it – when you give out information this early in the process, you’re painting future you into a corner.

Step 2: AI-Assisted Coding Screen

This is a one-hour coding interview conducted over screen share in your own IDE, using whatever AI tools you normally work with. There is no CoderPad, no sandboxed environment. You'll be asked to build something from scratch. In one case we know of, the problem was an in-memory file system with basic operations.

For most of the interview you'll be driving independently with minimal input from your interviewer. The expectation is that you use AI to implement your design rather than writing everything by hand, but you're responsible for reviewing what it produces and catching any bugs. Do some specification and requirements gathering before handing off to your AI tool, and make sure you're directing it efficiently so you're not waiting around for output.

Towards the end, expect the difficulty to ramp up. Concurrency and multithreading questions have come up as a late-stage challenge. If your implementation involves shared state, be ready to talk through what needs locking and why. For example, operations like mkdir and file writes typically need locks.

Step 3: "Life Story" interview

This interview is conducted by a recruiter, who will be asking you questions about your past to see what motivates and drives you: is there some common thread that’s been a theme or shown up in multiple places in your story and your career to date? Their goal is to suss out whether you’re a “3D person” who can communicate effectively with others, instead of just someone who’s technically gifted. Because Shopify is fully remote, they place extra importance on having employees who are personable and able to have a chat.

You may also be asked to sign Shopify’s code of conduct (we were able to find this copy from 2019; please email us to let us know if it’s no longer valid).

Step 4: Onsite

Shopify’s onsite lasts roughly 4 hours and consists of the following steps:

• AI-assisted coding (2 hours)
• Technical deep dive (1 hour)
• Possibly system design (1 hour; just for senior/staff-level engineers)

AI-Assisted Coding

The onsite includes a second AI-assisted coding round following the same format as the screening round. You use your own IDE, your own AI tools, and screen share. The problems are different, but the structure is the same: start simple, build incrementally, and expect the interviewer to add complexity as you go.

Technical Deep Dive

In this interview, you'll be doing a deep dive on a project you worked on, why it mattered, your contributions, how you overcame challenges, and so on. Be prepared to discuss technical details in depth. If you mention specific tools or technologies, expect to be asked about them in detail: how you've used them, why you chose them, and what the tradeoffs were.

System Design

You may not get a separate system design interview in your loop. Those are reserved for senior and sometimes staff-level candidates. That said, the AI-assisted coding rounds can develop a system design flavour as the interviewer adds complexity.

Types of Interview Questions to Expect at Shopify

AI-Assisted Coding

To figure out what types of questions to expect in your Shopify interviews, we did two things. First, we spoke to some current and former Shopify interviewers in our community. Then we cross-referenced all the anecdotes we heard with our own data-set of mock interviews. Based on all of the above, here's what to expect.

During the onsite, you will not get LeetCode-style questions. Rather, you will iteratively build something with your interviewer. You’ll start with the simplest possible implementation and then add features to it, testing as you go. Depending on how the interview is going, your interviewer will likely add on up to three additional layers of complexity, and what started as a simple problem will end up with a system design component as well.

Example questions include:

• Design and implement an LRU cache
• Given a list of products with a price and popularity rating, order them based on price and use popularity as a tiebreaker
• Implement a discounting feature for retail
• Build an in-memory filesystem with basic operations (ls, mkdir, read, write)

The problems aren't algorithmically hard. The challenge is in the design. Can you structure your code so that when the interviewer adds a new requirement, your architecture absorbs it without a rewrite? Build, test, confirm, then move to the next requirement.

System Design

Expect practical, operations-flavoured problems rather than generic "design Twitter" style questions. Come prepared to tie your design decisions back to Shopify's business context. We've heard of candidates being asked to design a task distribution system for warehouse workers as an example of the kind of problem you might face.

Check out our guide to system design interviews to help you prepare.