I was found on LinkedIn by an engineer from the hiring team. We exchanged a couple of emails, and after that, I was asked to schedule a chat with a recruiter.

Some days later, I had a 20-minute screening call with a recruiter via Skype. She was very friendly and asked me many professional and personal questions. She explained the interview process to me and what would come next.

One week later, I had two more interviews in a row via Skype, each lasting one hour.

The first was what they called a "Life Story" interview, with the same recruiter. The next was a technical interview with a member of the hiring team.

My feeling was great about these two interviews. I liked a lot of what I heard, and I think the reciprocal was true.

Another technical interview was scheduled for a week later, with an engineer from another team. This time, they went deeper into the kind of projects I worked on, asked for examples, the technologies I used, and open-source versus non-open-source software. Nothing was too difficult.

At the end, I also had a good feeling about this last interview. They were very kind and friendly the entire time, but no one was clear about the decision points for hiring.

A couple of days later, the recruiter called me on Skype to tell me they had decided not to continue with me, because apparently, my knowledge of open source was not good. This was very disappointing because, after all, open-source tools are easy to learn. However, security and DPP know-how and mindset are not easy to find, and I know I could contribute that to the company.

Life Story Interview:

Talk about yourself. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do for a living? What kind of sports activities did you do in high school? Why do you like programming? Why do you want to work for Shopify?

Technical Interview 1 (Specific):

Why did you like data privacy? Do you know GDPR? Tell me about some projects you worked on that were data privacy related.

Technical Interview 2 (Generalist):

Tell me about your projects. Are you familiar with open source?