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Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience - Stockholm, Sweden

July 1, 2019
Positive ExperienceNo Offer

Process

I applied at Shopify for a Senior Software Engineer role. After being shortlisted, I received an initial call from HR in July 2019. The complete process is divided into five rounds.

  1. Life Story Round: This is more like a behavioral round where they ask you to tell your life story, mentioning how and why you came to engineering. They try to test your communication skills and dig into your motivation for being an engineer. The round takes about an hour.

  2. Technical Screening: I had a back-to-back Life Story followed by a Technical Screening round. This round requires you to code a straightforward solution where the interviewer observes your coding process. This is to ensure you know how to code before they start the real interviews.

  3. Technical Discussion: This is a one-hour discussion with an engineer where you discuss your current projects and elaborate on at least one problem you solved end-to-end. The problem doesn't need to be very complex, but you are expected to go into detail when explaining the solution.

  4. Pair Programming Interview 1: This is a standard pair programming test where a problem is given, and you are supposed to code it end-to-end. The problem will not be very difficult and will not require any complex usage of data structures.

  5. Pair Programming Interview 2: This is the same as the above round.

The overall interview process was very fast and clean. I didn't get the offer in the end, but I had a good interview experience. The overall expectation is quite high, and you are supposed to think about TDD and perform clean code following SOLID principles in both of the pair programming rounds.

Tips to prepare for the interview:

  • No need to stress yourself over complex data structures and algorithms.
  • You are allowed to use the internet and check any documentation, as no one can remember the syntax completely.
  • Make sure you focus a lot on TDD. I think every interviewer expects you to share some set of extensive test cases/paths before writing the code.
  • Don't forget to explain in detail why you are creating each class and method. I tried to explain while coding, but in the feedback, I was not vocal enough.

Questions

Tell me how you came to engineering?

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 1 interview experience for the Shopify Senior Software Engineer role in Stockholm, Sweden.

Success Rate

0%
Pass Rate

Shopify's interview process for their Senior Software Engineer roles in Stockholm, Sweden is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive100%
Neutral0%
Negative0%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Shopify's Senior Software Engineer interview process in Stockholm, Sweden.

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