Inside Shopify’s Interview Process
Interviewed at Shopify in late 2024. They’re Canadian, growing fast, and have a different vibe than Silicon Valley tech companies. Here’s the real deal.
First Thing to Know
Shopify is Ruby on Rails. If you don’t know Rails, you can still get in, but it helps. More importantly: they care deeply about merchants (small businesses using their platform). Every decision is “How does this help merchants?”
The Interview Journey
Take-Home Challenge (3-4 hours): Yes, they still do take-homes. Mine was building a mini e-commerce feature in Rails. You can use any language, but Rails shows you’re serious. They review code quality, tests, and how you handle edge cases.
I spent 5 hours on mine (over-engineered it). Keep it simple – working code beats perfect architecture.
Technical Screen (1 hour): Discuss your take-home plus one live coding problem. Medium difficulty – arrays, strings, or hash maps. They want to see how you think through problems.
Virtual Onsite (3-4 rounds):
- Coding Round: Live problem on CoderPad. Mine was e-commerce related: “Calculate total order value with discounts and tax.” More practical than theoretical.
- System Design: Design something for online stores. I got “Design an inventory management system.” Think about scale – Shopify merchants sell millions of products.
- Values/Culture Round: Questions about their values (build for long-term, act like owners). They asked “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a product decision.” Be honest.
- Technical Deep Dive: Deep discussion about past projects, technical decisions, and trade-offs. They asked about scaling challenges I’ve faced.
Topics That Matter
- E-Commerce: Payments, inventory, orders, fraud detection
- Rails Patterns: If you know Rails – MVC, ActiveRecord, background jobs
- API Design: GraphQL (they use it heavily), REST, rate limiting
- Scalability: Multi-tenancy, database sharding, caching
- Mobile: They have iOS/Android apps – know mobile challenges
My Preparation
- Learned Rails Basics: Even though I’m not a Rails dev, I spent a week learning it. Built a simple CRUD app. Worth it.
- Used Shopify as a Customer: Set up a test store (free trial). Played with products, orders, themes. Understanding merchant pain points helped.
- Studied E-Commerce Systems: Read about payment processing, PCI compliance, inventory management. This came up multiple times.
- Did 80 LeetCode Mediums: They don’t grind you with hard algorithms. Focus on clean code and practical solutions.
- Prepared Owner Mindset Stories: Examples of taking ownership beyond your job description. They care about this.
Where People Fail
The take-home. Some people treat it like a throwaway project. I reviewed code with my interviewer for 30 minutes – they found every corner I’d cut.
Also: Not understanding merchants. If you can’t explain why small businesses matter or how Shopify helps them, you’ll struggle in behavioral rounds.
Honest Assessment
Shopify is growing fast. That means opportunity but also chaos. They’re figuring things out as they scale. If you want structure, go to Google. If you want impact and can handle ambiguity, Shopify is great.
The Canadian HQ (Ottawa, Toronto) has a great team culture. US remote folks report feeling a bit disconnected but it’s getting better.
Comp: Competitive but not FAANG-level. Base + equity. Stock has been volatile. Total comp is 10-15% below Meta/Google but cost of living in Canada helps.
Last Updated: February 2026