I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Shopify (Toronto, ON) in Jan 2020
Interview
I applied through the website. Got an email and was referred to another related role that they thought i'd fit for my experience.
First call was with a recruiter to know more about me and get started - this was for 30 mins.
Next - Life story and coding interview on same day: (an hour each)
Life Story interview is basically just talking about your life and what experiences you have gone through to reach where you are, its more of an informal chat to get to know more about your personality (I dont know why people here think its invading privacy - they dont force you to reveal anything you are not comfortable to - it was just as if i was chatting with a friend)
Online coding interview using coderpad (this was a very basic question to see if you can write code - nothing complex) I'd recommend talking through your solution and explaining approach before you start.
Next step - Onsite interview:
Onsite involved 2 Pair programming challenges and 1 technical deep dive.
Pair programming involves you working with one of the devs onsite where you have a problem and you have walk through the solution - whiteboard and also write the while both are sharing one big monitor while writing the solution. Think of it as coding with a colleague and talking to through each step you're performing.
Technical deep dive is talking about / whiteboarding one of the projects you have worked on and having a conversation about it.
Within or less than a week the decision and offer was given to me. The whole time the recruitment team was in touch with me and kept me updates about each process and whats going on. They walked me through feedback and explained all benefits/perks etc in detail. Provided reference to hiring manager to the team i was assigned to so i can talk to the manager.
I think this is the best ever interview process i have been through in terms of communication as well as convenience for onsite travel.
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.