i've been stressing about my upcoming shopify new grad swe interview for three weeks straight so i spent that time actually researching what to expect. posting this so future new grads don't have to start from zero.
what the loop looks like for entry level / new grad SWE:
from what i can piece together from recent posts + a friend who went through it in early 2026: recruiter screen (30 min). basically: walk me through your resume, one coding question (easy-medium leetcode territory), why shopify. take-home or a timed hackerrank assessment depending on team. take-home seems more common for the permanent roles. they give you a real problem with a real dataset, not abstract algo puzzles. if you get the take-home: do not rush it. write clean readable code, add a README explaining your choices. technical interview (60 min). one or two coding questions. for new grad it's data structures and algorithms but shopify tends toward practical problems, not obscure graph traversals. think: design a simple inventory system, write a function that transforms order data. ruby comes up sometimes (shopify's primary backend language) but you can usually use python or JS. values interview. this one MATTERS at shopify more than at a lot of companies. they take their values seriously (not in a corporate-cringe way, more in a 'we'll actually pass on good coders who don't fit' way). prepare stories for: impact you had on a team, a time you had to learn something fast, a disagreement where you changed your mind. possibly a final hiring manager round for some teams.
how i'm prepping: leetcode easy/medium focus. arrays, strings, hashmaps, basic trees. don't need hard for entry level. reading up on shopify's engineering blog because the take-home often connects to real problems they've worked on writing 5-6 strong behavioral stories and adapting them to their specific values
if anyone has done the 2026 new grad loop please correct anything i got wrong. also what was the timeline like from application to offer?