Shopify Machine Learning Engineer Interview Experience — Pair Programming Onsite, Rejected for No Unit Tests

Shopify·Machine Learning Engineer·Aug 2025
OnsiteRejectedmedium

The interview was 75 minutes, and you need to have your own coding environment set up ahead of time. The interview question is on GitHub — after cloning it, you write the code locally, then push it back up to GitHub. The problem wasn't very hard, it's basically simple OOP — write a class that implements a feature you can interact with from the command line, it doesn't really involve designing data structures or algorithms. You get 60 minutes to write the code, and then for 15 minutes afterward the interviewer asks you questions about your code.

I did write the code in the end, but HR later told me I didn't pass. The feedback was that I didn't communicate deeply enough with the interviewer, and also that I didn't write unit tests. I work on DL algorithms, and normally I don't write unit tests. For anyone interviewing after me — pay attention to this, write unit tests. Since it's pair programming, how well you communicate is probably also something they're evaluating. But I was really nervous at the time, and my spoken English isn't great either, so I really didn't have much energy left to chat with the interviewer.

Anyway, I actually don't like pair programming that much.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Shopify
Role
Machine Learning Engineer
Rounds
Onsite
Outcome
Rejected
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Aug 2025
Questions from this interview
2 questions

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