The Shopify interview process is excellent. I've only seen processes this smooth and thoughtful at small-to-medium stage start-ups. Every single person I met with was super kind, and as individuals, they all took the stress out of a multi-stage interview process.

The first stage after applying was a 30-minute technical screen where you do a live coding exercise. It's not geared towards grilling you about time or space complexity; this is really just to see how you work and talk through a basic solution before you proceed to the Life Story interview phase.

The Life Story is an hour-long session with a recruiter. This is one of the "soft skills" type interviews, but it's really oriented around learning about your background, your motivation, your mission alignment, and even how you cross-collaborate with different teams.

In no particular order, the next interviews are:

• A lengthier pair programming exercise
• A system design interview (virtual whiteboarding)
• A technical deep dive on 1-2 projects you've worked on

I don't want to go too deeply into what each interview entails because once you're in the process, the recruitment team has built up a whole portal full of information to help you prepare and orient yourself around what each interview is assessing, and they explain it better than I can.

My sense is that Shopify cares deeply about mission-oriented and thoughtful engineers who can articulate the decisions they're making, recognize their pitfalls, and be humble throughout a collaborative process. If you have significant experience working collaboratively (i.e., pairing), are able to articulate your thoughts while working on a solution, and are able to begin recognizing possible designs for a system and working through the ups and downs of those designs collaboratively, you may find yourself right at home in these interviews.

If you're worried that Shopify has FAANG-like interviews with FAANG-level stress, you'll be pleasantly surprised to see how comfortable this process is.

Do you communicate authentically and have a history of building high trust with others?