Shopify Software Engineer Interview Questions

Shopify·Software Engineer·Take-home Assignment

Jul 2026

Shopify software engineer round where they handed me a local URL shortener to build from scratch, library-style, with persistence and tests. More depth than I expected for what sounds like a toy problem.

Build a local URL shortener library with shorten and resolve operations, URL validation, hash-based code generation, collision handling, in-memory storage, JSON file persistence, and deduplication for repeated inputs.
How does memory usage scale as the number of stored URLs grows, and what architectural changes would you make if the data no longer fits on a single machine?

“The collision handling part is where I spent way too long.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Shopify coding interview that extended an existing Mars rover simulation. The core task was adding collision detection to a multi-rover system, which sounds contained but has more edge cases than you'd expect going in.

You're given a Mars rover controller that already handles creating, deleting, selecting, and moving rovers. Add collision avoidance: if the cell directly ahead of the selected rover is occupied by another rover, the move command should fail and the caller should be notified. Nothing else about the rover's state should change.

“The base system being pre-built was a small relief, but I spent too long re-reading the existing API instead of just jumping into the collision logic.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026

Interviewed for a PMM role at Shopify. Just one question to go off here but it's a meaty one about positioning validation.

How did you know your positioning was actually working?

“This tripped me up more than I expected.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Two coding problems for a Shopify SWE round, both pretty self-contained. The LRU cache is a classic and the Secret Santa one was more fun than expected, though the derangement part tripped me up a bit.

Design and implement a bounded key-value cache that evicts the least recently used entry when full. Both get and put operations should run in O(1) time.
Write a program that reads a CSV of participants and assigns each person a gift recipient such that nobody gives to themselves and every person both gives and receives exactly once. The assignment should be randomized.

“Classic LRU problem.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Shopify coding interview, backend-ish design problem dressed up as a fun Mars rover extension. The base problem was familiar but they layered on multi-rover concurrency management and it got interesting fast.

You're given a basic Mars rover controller (single rover, starts at origin facing north, supports turn left, turn right, and move). Extend it to support multiple rovers on the same grid simultaneously, with operations to create, delete, and select rovers by ID. Commands like move and turn should apply to whichever rover is currently selected.

“The base rover part I had no problem with, done that one before.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026

Shopify strategy round, probably for a product or bizdev role. Single question about retail expansion, which sounds deceptively simple but really asks you to think like an executive about physical vs digital commerce tradeoffs.

Shopify recently opened its first retail location in LA. How would you think about the strategy for future physical locations?

“I went straight to unit economics and geographic expansion logic, which in hindsight was way too narrow.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Shopify virtual onsite, Life Story round for a software engineer role. Pretty conversational, less technical grilling and more about who you are and where you're headed. Felt like they were sizing up cultural fit as much as anything else.

How did you get into tech?
What does your next one to two years look like professionally?
Did you review the link I sent you, and what are your thoughts on it?
What's your take on 40% growth as a target or benchmark?

“Standard origin story question.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jun 2026

Shopify software engineering interview with a coding round built around designing a Wordle-style game from scratch. The problem had more edge cases than it looked like at first glance, and there was apparently a component where you might have to read someone else's generated code and find bugs in it too.

Design and implement a four-letter word guessing game with a clean API. The game accepts guesses against a target word from a dictionary, rejects invalid inputs without counting them as attempts, and returns a positional hint string using Wordle-style duplicate-letter matching rules.

“The basic loop was fine, I got the structure down pretty fast.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Shopify SWE interview that was basically a grid simulation problem. Clean problem statement, classic rover-on-a-plateau setup, but the edge cases around collision and boundary handling are where they're really testing you.

Build a command-line simulator for autonomous rovers on a rectangular grid. Each rover has a position and heading, receives a string of turn and move commands, and you need to output where each rover ends up. Rovers are processed sequentially, moves that go off-grid or into an occupied cell are silently ignored.

“The base movement logic is pretty mechanical once you map out the heading rotations.”

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Shopify·Software Engineer·Executive / Final Round

Jun 2026

CEO-level strategy question for Shopify. Not much to go on here, but it's the kind of open-ended prompt that can spiral fast if you don't have a framework ready.

If you were the CEO of Shopify, what would you prioritize focusing on next?

“This is a massive open canvas and that's exactly the problem.”

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