Shopify Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — HR Screen Cut Short Before the Hour Was Up

Shopify·Machine Learning Engineer·Sep 2025
HR Screenmedium

In summary, if you read through the interview experience posts here, you'll basically have most of the questions covered. The main thing is to sound natural in the moment — it feels like you need to get along well with the HR person during the chat.

At the start, the HR person made small talk, chatting about the weekend.

First question: why are you interested in Shopify. I tried to follow a template — saying why I was interested while also explaining how it aligned with my own background — but I got cut off and told I didn't need to go into that much detail.

Second question: why do you choose your major. I also got interrupted partway through this one. I started by explaining why I picked my major for undergrad, got cut off in the middle, and was asked to talk about the transition to grad school instead. Then they asked why I chose this job (I was a bit thrown by this — obviously I chose it because they gave me an offer — so I just gave a rough summary of my job search).

Third question: introduce your ML project.

Fourth question: what other major projects have you worked on. I probably didn't answer this one well — even though they asked about my main projects, I only ended up talking about how that one project got started.

Fifth question: what technology did your XX project mainly use. I described a technical framework and used an analogy to make it easier to understand. My answer was probably incomplete, but she seemed fairly satisfied with it.

We didn't talk for the full hour, which is a pretty bad sign.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Shopify
Role
Machine Learning Engineer
Rounds
HR Screen
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Sep 2025
Questions from this interview
2 questions

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