Shopify

Software Engineer (Internship) Interview Experience - Waterloo, Canada

October 1, 2019

Positive ExperienceGot Offer

Process

The first round was a life story. The second round was half a technical deep dive of your side project and the other half was a "design x" kind of question where you don't have to code anything but just explain your thought process.

Questions

Life story

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 2 interview experiences for the Shopify Software Engineer (Internship) role in Waterloo, Canada.

Success Rate

50%

Pass Rate

Shopify's interview process for their Software Engineer (Internship) roles in Waterloo, Canada is fairly selective, failing a large portion of engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive50%

Neutral0%

Negative50%

Candidates reported having mixed feelings for Shopify's Software Engineer (Internship) interview process in Waterloo, Canada.

Shopify Work Experiences

Great employer with flexible hours, limited ownership

Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee

Pros: Great employer with a lot of benefits and flexible working hours as long as you got the job done.

Cons: There was less ownership than I'd like, but it was ultimately down to the fact that it's such a large company.

Great employer with flexible hours, limited ownership

Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee

Pros: Great employer with a lot of benefits and flexible working hours as long as you got the job done.

Cons: There was less ownership than I'd like, but it was ultimately down to the fact that it's such a large company.

Fun atmosphere but slow pace and limited guidance

Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee

Pros: It was a fun intern class, basically a summer camp.

Cons: There was a slow pace of movement and not much solid guidance.

Fun atmosphere but slow pace and limited guidance

Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee

Pros: It was a fun intern class, basically a summer camp.

Cons: There was a slow pace of movement and not much solid guidance.

Shiny from the outside, toxic on the inside

Senior Software Engineer • Former Employee

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Pros: Tonnes of perks: SWAG, lots of monetary benefits. It's big, so maybe you can shuffle to find a team you like.

Cons: - Toxic top-down culture: Leadership says a lot of pretty words, but they don't actually want your feedback. - The toxicity is driven by the CEO. - Mandatory on-call. - Weird imbalance between "how good we say we are, and what we say we can do" versus what we can actually get done.

Shiny from the outside, toxic on the inside

Senior Software Engineer • Former Employee

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Pros: Tonnes of perks: SWAG, lots of monetary benefits. It's big, so maybe you can shuffle to find a team you like.

Cons: - Toxic top-down culture: Leadership says a lot of pretty words, but they don't actually want your feedback. - The toxicity is driven by the CEO. - Mandatory on-call. - Weird imbalance between "how good we say we are, and what we say we can do" versus what we can actually get done.

Great employer with flexible hours, limited ownership

Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee

Pros: Great employer with a lot of benefits and flexible working hours as long as you got the job done.

Cons: There was less ownership than I'd like, but it was ultimately down to the fact that it's such a large company.

5.0
Great employer with flexible hours, limited ownership
Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee
Toronto, ON
May 16, 2026
Pros: Great employer with a lot of benefits and flexible working hours as long as you got the job done.
Cons: There was less ownership than I'd like, but it was ultimately down to the fact that it's such a large company.

Fun atmosphere but slow pace and limited guidance

Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee

Pros: It was a fun intern class, basically a summer camp.

Cons: There was a slow pace of movement and not much solid guidance.

2.0
Fun atmosphere but slow pace and limited guidance
Software Engineer (Internship) • Former Employee
Toronto, ON
July 30, 2026
Pros: It was a fun intern class, basically a summer camp.
Cons: There was a slow pace of movement and not much solid guidance.

Shiny from the outside, toxic on the inside

Senior Software Engineer • Former Employee

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Pros: Tonnes of perks: SWAG, lots of monetary benefits. It's big, so maybe you can shuffle to find a team you like.

Cons: - Toxic top-down culture: Leadership says a lot of pretty words, but they don't actually want your feedback. - The toxicity is driven by the CEO. - Mandatory on-call. - Weird imbalance between "how good we say we are, and what we say we can do" versus what we can actually get done.

2.0
Shiny from the outside, toxic on the inside
Senior Software Engineer • Former Employee
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
August 5, 2021
Pros: Tonnes of perks: SWAG, lots of monetary benefits. It's big, so maybe you can shuffle to find a team you like.
Cons: - Toxic top-down culture: Leadership says a lot of pretty words, but they don't actually want your feedback. - The toxicity is driven by the CEO. - Mandatory on-call. - Weird imbalance between "how good we say we are, and what we say we can do" versus what we can actually get done.

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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