Shopify Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — OA Puzzles Then a One-Hour Life Story Interview

Shopify·Machine Learning Engineer·Sep 2025
HR ScreenOnline AssessmentIn progressmedium

After submitting my resume on the official website, I quickly got a reply from HR. They scheduled a life story interview, but before that I needed to do an OA. The OA has two parts. The first part is about 20-25 minutes, with 40 questions total — spot-the-difference across images, number sequences where you find the pattern, addition and multiplication calculations, that kind of thing. You're allowed to use a calculator, and other tools are fine too. But the time was too short, so I actually only got through about 30 of the questions and just randomly picked answers for the rest. The second part is a personality test, with a lot of questions that keep circling back to the same type of thing over and over. I'm still not sure how much the OA actually affects the interview outcome. You have to finish the OA before the life story interview.

Then came the life story interview. This was my first round with Shopify, and it lasted a full hour. After it started, the interviewer first walked through the interview process, then went ahead and asked the first question: why do you want to go into engineering? After that she had me walk through my background point by point off my resume, and asked some questions about why I left my previous jobs along the way. Overall there weren't any particularly tough questions, no pressure-test stuff.

At the end she also asked whether I needed sponsorship, whether I wanted to discuss compensation, and whether I had any questions for her.

Right after the interview they scheduled the second round already — pair programming, expected to run 75 minutes. I'll post again once that one's done.

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

Practice the questions from this interview

Discussion

Sign in to join the discussion. The author is notified of every comment.

Loading comments…

Interview at a glance

Company
Shopify
Role
Machine Learning Engineer
Rounds
Online Assessment → HR Screen
Outcome
In progress
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Sep 2025
Questions from this interview
1 question

Real Shopify interview experiences

First-hand reports from Shopify candidates — the rounds, the questions they were asked, and how it went.

All 23 Shopify interview experiences