Shopify Interview Questions — Page 1

Shopify·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Sep 2025

Four-round process for a software engineering internship at Shopify: an OA with behavioral scales, trivia, and two easy coding problems, then a system design round coded locally and pushed to a repo, then a final life story interview where they actually quiz you on Shopify reading material they send beforehand.

Solve two array manipulation problems under a timed coding assessment.
Design and implement a bank system using OOP principles, including unit tests, then extend it to support different account types.
Walk us through your background: how you got into programming, your hobbies, projects you've worked on, and experiences that shaped you.
After reading the provided Shopify principles document and the CEO's emails, what stood out to you and how do those ideas connect to how you work?

“Pretty standard easy-level stuff, nothing that should trip anyone up.”

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Shopify·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026

Shopify PM interview with a question about churn tolerance. Not much context shared but it's a tricky strategic topic that can go a lot of directions.

Is high churn acceptable for a platform like Shopify, and under what circumstances?

“This one requires you to actually take a stance rather than hedge.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Shopify had me build a Mars rover controller from scratch in an empty Git repo. The requirements were deliberately vague, which was either a clever design choice or mildly frustrating depending on your mood. Pretty classic systems-thinking exercise dressed up as a fun space problem.

Build a Mars rover controller from an empty Git repository. The rover starts at (0,0) facing north and must support turn_left, turn_right, and move commands, reporting position and direction after each command. Requirements are intentionally underspecified.

“The underspecified part is where I spent most of my mental energy.”

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Shopify·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Shopify ML engineer interview where they hand you a repo and tell you to build a URL shortener using an AI coding assistant, then watch how you drive the process. Less about raw coding chops, more about whether you can actually manage an AI agent without just rubber-stamping everything it spits out.

Build a URL shortener service end-to-end using an AI coding assistant, starting from a provided git repository. You need to design the shortening logic, persistence layer, and API endpoints, then commit the finished implementation.
Walk through your design decisions: how did you handle hash collisions, what encoding scheme did you choose, and why did you pick that key length?
How did you decide on the persistence layer for the service, and what trade-offs did you consider?

“The twist is that you're not just coding, you're reviewing every diff the AI produces before accepting it.”

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Shopify·Data Analyst·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Shopify data/analytics interview with a SQL question that had a sneaky schema trap. Nothing crazy but the shops table detail would've wrecked me if I hadn't noticed it.

Write a SQL query that returns the count of distinct user sessions per shop and per day. The sessions table has one row per session, users maps each user to a shop, and the shops table may contain duplicate shop_id rows.

“The duplicate shop_id thing in the shops table is what gets people.”

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Shopify·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Shopify ML engineer interview, looks like it was a deep technical round focused on one meaty open-ended question about owning a full ML project soup to nuts. Not a leetcode session, more of a 'convince me you've actually shipped something' conversation.

Walk me through an end-to-end ML project you owned. Cover the business goal, who the stakeholders were, how you measured success, what your data pipeline looked like, why you picked the model you did, how you trained and evaluated it, how it was served, and what you'd change if you did it again.

“This is basically a 45-minute question disguised as one sentence.”

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Shopify·Frontend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Pair programming round at Shopify for a frontend role. The task was to build a word guessing game together with the interviewer, which sounds fun until you're actually doing it live and second-guessing every component decision you make.

Build a word guessing game in the browser during a live pair programming session.

“More open-ended than I expected.”

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Shopify·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

Shopify data scientist interview with a heavy SQL focus, specifically around theme piracy analysis. Three connected problems, all in one session, building on the same schema. It felt less like a coding screen and more like a take-home that someone decided to give you live.

Given a schema tracking theme installations on an e-commerce platform, write SQL to compute a monthly pirated install rate: for each calendar month, find the share of shops that installed at least one pirated theme out of all shops that installed any theme that month.
Using the same schema, write SQL to compute a monthly active pirated usage rate: for each month, what fraction of shops with any active theme also had at least one pirated theme active during that month?
Still using the same schema, write SQL to compute monthly and cumulative estimated revenue loss from pirated theme installations, where each active month of a pirated install costs the monthly license fee of the legitimate theme it copies.

“The install vs active distinction tripped me up at first.”

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Shopify·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026

ML design round at Shopify for an MLE role. Got a product ranking problem and had to walk through the full modeling pipeline end to end.

You're given a product ranking problem. Walk through how you'd approach it end to end, covering data, features, model selection, training, and evaluation.

“I went with a classification framing first and then mentioned learning-to-rank as an alternative.”

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Shopify·Data Scientist·Hiring Manager Screen

Apr 2026

Interviewed for a Data Scientist role at Shopify, mostly focused on how you work with other teams and what tools you actually use day to day. Nothing too technically brutal but the cross-functional angle was front and center throughout.

What is the most challenging project you have worked on, and what made it difficult?
How do you work with product managers and engineers to get things shipped?
Walk me through the technical tools and languages you use regularly.
How comfortable are you with data visualization and BI tools, and which ones have you used most?
Are you comfortable in a fully remote, digital-first work environment?

“I structured my answer as situation, action, result and it felt pretty smooth.”

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