Shopify Data Scientist Interview Experience — Data Viz Case, App Store Marketplace Case, and Life Story

The questions are the same as what's already covered in other interview reports out there, so I'll just add some extra details.

Data Interpretation

They start by showing you a chart of weekly session count over the past 3 years, with a spike around May, and ask you to give a hypothesis for it.

Then they add conversion rate to the same chart, plus another metric (I forget exactly what it was) — at the point where session count spikes in May, conversion also drops a lot, and they ask you to give a hypothesis for that too.

Finally they give you week-level data to plot yourself, and there's a trap here: the year-week column has a data type issue (annoying — 20 minutes of plotting time, and they still throw in a data quality trap on top of that). The final conclusion ended up being (i) broken down by shop type, the session count spike only applies to certain types of shops, and (ii) broken down by session duration bucket, the session count spike only applies to the 0 and 0-30 session duration buckets. (No guarantee your data will look the same — at least that's what my data showed.) Honestly the plotting part itself is simple, Google Sheets is enough — practice pivot tables, add a filter, throw together a line chart, and you're done.

Case: Shopify App Store

This one is just asking how you'd measure success. For this round they seemed to want you to talk through the whole thing yourself with no guidance. The question itself wasn't hard, but my interviewer for this round had a sour face the entire time, his own English wasn't very fluent, and his questions weren't clearly phrased either. Note that the app store is a marketplace, so you need to think about the experience for three sides — Shopify, merchants, and developers. They also asked about the data model — what datasets you'd need, what the primary key is, and how those datasets would join together. This round's experience was pretty bad.

Life Story

They asked about everything, down to why I picked my major in undergrad, and why I joined and why I left every job I've had.