just finished my shopify DE loop in may 2026 so this is fresh. applying for a senior data engineer role, remote canada. five rounds total.
round 1 was a 45-min recruiter screen. pretty standard: what's your experience with streaming vs batch pipelines, talk through a data model you designed. nothing tricky.
round 2 was a take-home. they sent me a messy CSV dataset and asked me to write SQL queries to clean it, derive some business metrics, and explain your assumptions. i used postgres. the queries themselves weren't hard but the ambiguity was the actual test. the dataset had duplicates, nulls in places that mattered, and timestamp timezone issues. i wrote a short doc explaining every design decision alongside the sql.
round 3: live coding. one sql window function problem (rank within partition, then filter on that rank), one python question on writing a simple incremental ETL function. both reasonable. the sql one had a subtle group-by gotcha that caught me off guard but i talked through it and they seemed fine with that.
round 4: system design for data. design a pipeline that ingests raw clickstream data from shopify merchants, handles late-arriving events, and produces a daily active merchants metric. this was the meatiest round. they care about: idempotency. they asked specifically how you'd handle a retry without double-counting late data handling. i talked through watermarks / event-time vs processing-time, they nodded cost tradeoffs. when would you use a data warehouse vs a data lake layer
round 5: behavioral / values. shopify's values are all over this round. they ask impact questions but framed around their mission of making commerce better for everyone. the 'tell me about a time you had to make a tradeoff' question came up. also one on how i worked with non-technical stakeholders.
comp offer: ~CAD 165k base, stock refreshes on a 4-year vest. nothing blew me away but the remote setup and no-meeting-wednesday culture were real draws.
overall: if you're a DE interviewing at shopify, SQL and pipeline design are the core competencies they actually test. know your window functions cold. and practice articulating the WHY behind design decisions, not just the what.