I applied for Staff Engineer in March 2021. The recruiting team quickly set up a coding challenge. This was followed by a "Life Story" interview and then four-hour-long sessions for Pair Programming, Technical Problem Solving, and Technical Deep Dive.

The coding challenge involved an easy-level sorting problem where I did not need to worry about time or space complexity, only about resolving the challenge.

The "Life Story" interview required me to explain how I got into software and what I had accomplished throughout my career. I believe my experience working on fairly unique projects as a lead engineer made a good impression, as the recruiting team tried to set up the final stage of the interview. However, it took two weeks to schedule, and I had to remind them twice that I was waiting for dates.

In the final stage, the pair programming session involved implementing a "secret Santa" matching system. My advice here would be to use debugging tools with breakpoints. I did not use debugging tools and relied solely on printing variables, which was a significant drawback.

Technical Problem Solving was a system design interview where I had to explicitly discuss concepts like Queues, Load Balancers, Race Conditions, and Data Modeling techniques. Simply listing these in your CV is not enough; you must demonstrate their application during the interview.

In my experience, the Technical Deep Dive felt somewhat formal and did not add much value to the overall interview. The interviewers were more interested in the legality and use cases of my projects than the technical aspects.

The interviewers were very nice, and I genuinely enjoyed the interviews. Although I was rejected, they arranged a feedback session where they discussed the interviews and the reasons for my failure.

My only advice to anyone attending interviews is to prepare as you would for any FAANG company. Shopify expects very similar answers.

Code Challenge: Sort a list of items based on price.

Pair Programming: Secret Santa colleague picker.

Problem Solving: A system for reserving books.