Shopify

Senior Backend Engineer Interview Experience - New York, New York

April 1, 2022

Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Experience is similar to other candidate interviews on Glassdoor.

Initial coding round with an engineer. The coding challenge was easy and solved in 5 minutes.

Second round of interview was a "life story" round, in which I think I did my best.

Later, I got a rejection email without any detailed feedback on what basis they made the decision.

Don't waste your time interviewing here.

Questions

The goal of the initial round was to complete a simple coding exercise. No optimal solution was needed.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Shopify Senior Backend Engineer role in New York, New York.

Success Rate

0%

Pass Rate

Shopify's interview process for their Senior Backend Engineer roles in New York, New York is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive0%

Neutral0%

Negative100%

Candidates reported having very negative feelings for Shopify's Senior Backend Engineer interview process in New York, New York.

Shopify Work Experiences

Great ICs and CEO, rapidly declining culture due to Microsoft invasion

Senior Backend Engineer • Current Employee

Pros: Legacy Shopify ICs and lower-level managers are excellent and generally quite nice, as the company is Canadian after all. The caliber of engineering talent is generally high. There is a dev-friendly stack using Ruby and Rails. The company features bleeding-edge AI adoption with an unlimited token budget.

Cons: Recently, the company brought over a CTO from Microsoft. He brought with him a lot of not-at-all-nice people who are highly political, frequently rude or condescending to legacy Shopifolk, and make consistently bad and dev-hostile technical decisions. Bleeding-edge AI adoption is being used to justify unreasonably increased expectations.

Great ICs and CEO, rapidly declining culture due to Microsoft invasion

Senior Backend Engineer • Current Employee

Pros: Legacy Shopify ICs and lower-level managers are excellent and generally quite nice, as the company is Canadian after all. The caliber of engineering talent is generally high. There is a dev-friendly stack using Ruby and Rails. The company features bleeding-edge AI adoption with an unlimited token budget.

Cons: Recently, the company brought over a CTO from Microsoft. He brought with him a lot of not-at-all-nice people who are highly political, frequently rude or condescending to legacy Shopifolk, and make consistently bad and dev-hostile technical decisions. Bleeding-edge AI adoption is being used to justify unreasonably increased expectations.

Flexible But Low Pay

Data Engineer • Current Employee

New York, New York, United States

Pros: Flexible hours and work environment

Cons: Low salary and bossy culture

Flexible But Low Pay

Data Engineer • Current Employee

New York, New York, United States

Pros: Flexible hours and work environment

Cons: Low salary and bossy culture

Loved my job, but not losing it

Software Engineer • Former Employee

New York, New York, United States

Pros: World-class engineers, a dev-first culture, stellar internal tools. Remote experience keeps getting better.

Cons: Internal openness can lead to unfulfilled “promises,” which is confusing and damages trust.

Loved my job, but not losing it

Software Engineer • Former Employee

New York, New York, United States

Pros: World-class engineers, a dev-first culture, stellar internal tools. Remote experience keeps getting better.

Cons: Internal openness can lead to unfulfilled “promises,” which is confusing and damages trust.

Great ICs and CEO, rapidly declining culture due to Microsoft invasion

Senior Backend Engineer • Current Employee

Pros: Legacy Shopify ICs and lower-level managers are excellent and generally quite nice, as the company is Canadian after all. The caliber of engineering talent is generally high. There is a dev-friendly stack using Ruby and Rails. The company features bleeding-edge AI adoption with an unlimited token budget.

Cons: Recently, the company brought over a CTO from Microsoft. He brought with him a lot of not-at-all-nice people who are highly political, frequently rude or condescending to legacy Shopifolk, and make consistently bad and dev-hostile technical decisions. Bleeding-edge AI adoption is being used to justify unreasonably increased expectations.

2.0
Great ICs and CEO, rapidly declining culture due to Microsoft invasion
Senior Backend Engineer • Current Employee
Chicago, IL
June 9, 2026
Pros: Legacy Shopify ICs and lower-level managers are excellent and generally quite nice, as the company is Canadian after all. The caliber of engineering talent is generally high. There is a dev-friendly stack using Ruby and Rails. The company features bleeding-edge AI adoption with an unlimited token budget.
Cons: Recently, the company brought over a CTO from Microsoft. He brought with him a lot of not-at-all-nice people who are highly political, frequently rude or condescending to legacy Shopifolk, and make consistently bad and dev-hostile technical decisions. Bleeding-edge AI adoption is being used to justify unreasonably increased expectations.

Flexible But Low Pay

Data Engineer • Current Employee

New York, New York, United States

Pros: Flexible hours and work environment

Cons: Low salary and bossy culture

5.0
Flexible But Low Pay
Data Engineer • Current Employee
New York, New York, United States
April 7, 2023
Pros: Flexible hours and work environment
Cons: Low salary and bossy culture

Loved my job, but not losing it

Software Engineer • Former Employee

New York, New York, United States

Pros: World-class engineers, a dev-first culture, stellar internal tools. Remote experience keeps getting better.

Cons: Internal openness can lead to unfulfilled “promises,” which is confusing and damages trust.

4.0
Loved my job, but not losing it
Software Engineer • Former Employee
New York, New York, United States
May 19, 2023
Pros: World-class engineers, a dev-first culture, stellar internal tools. Remote experience keeps getting better.
Cons: Internal openness can lead to unfulfilled “promises,” which is confusing and damages trust.

Shopify Interview Questions

Walking Robot Simulation

Simulate a robot's movement on an infinite grid based on a sequence of commands and obstacles. Determine the square of the robot's final Euclidean distance from the origin.

ArraysGreedy Algorithms

LRU Cache

Design a data structure that acts as a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache. Implement methods to get and put key-value pairs, evicting the least recently used entry when the cache is full.

Design In-Memory File System

Implement an in-memory file system with basic operations like creating directories, adding files, and listing contents. The file system should support path-based navigation.

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