Shopify Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — AI-Assisted Coding Rounds and a Manager Track Moved to IC

I'm about to start at Shopify as a Senior SWE, and I genuinely enjoyed how their interview process worked.

• Two coding rounds where AI help is allowed. One was the screen and the other sat inside the onsite. You can work in your own IDE on your own laptop. I went with VS Code and Claude Sonnet, which felt slightly quicker than Opus and gave me results just as good.
• One technical deep dive. Draw your Excalidraw diagram ahead of time for it. It's really a system design round told as a look back at something you built. I put a lot of prep time into this one.
• One technical problem solving round. This is basically system design, done live in Excalidraw from a prompt they hand you. It was probably my weakest round and I should have gone deeper.
• One life story round. My advice is to pick a story that lines up with Shopify's values, and more generally to keep showing growth and impact as you walk through your career.
• One management life story round. Here you want to show the impact you drove for your teams, that you hold the quality bar high, and that you can handle performance management, growing people and so on.
• One team match call with the hiring manager. I got matched with the first team I spoke to.

The pattern across all of it is that they start from something simple and have you build on top of it, which is exactly what I'd read to expect beforehand. In the AI-assisted rounds, try to make it obvious that you are the one steering the design, while still getting the AI to produce something clean and working fast. I suspect the same applies to the system design round too, but my nerves got to me there and I didn't go deep enough.

There's no LeetCode. What gives a good signal is knowing the practical side of sensible software design patterns and how to solve common problems. Your code still has to be efficient and you should expect to be called out if it isn't, but they care about maintainable code, and above everything else about code that works.

They were very flexible on interview timing and scheduling, and they stayed in touch the whole way through.

I began this loop on the manager track, since my most recent job was as an EM at a FAANG company. I didn't do well enough in the manager interview, so they moved me over to the IC track, which apparently isn't unusual. I'm a little disappointed that the level is Senior and not Staff, but the comp was still really good.