Shopify Data Science Interview Questions
Shopify powers 800,000 businesses in approximately 175 countries.
The first iteration of Shopify (before it was called that) was an online store that sold snowboards. Eventually, there was a pivot to becoming an e- commerce platform. It’s been named Canada’s “smartest” company, among myriad other well-earned accolades. Shopify was the third largest e-commerce CMS in 2018, with a market share of 10.03% in the first million websites. In 2018, Shopify platform did 1.5+ Billion $ in sales on Cyber Monday alone.
Interview Process
The first step is the phone screen with HR person. The next step is a three part in person interview (‘life story’ and technical interview). Once those are clear, there is an onsite interview which consists of two more technical interviews, and three more interviews before prospective team leads.
Important Reading
- Shopify Tech Stack: E-commerce at Scale
- GraphQL API: Github
- Recommender Systems: How shopify uses recommender systems
Data Science Related Interview Questions
- Go through a previously completed project and explain it. Why did you make the choices in the project that you did?
- What’s the difference between Type I and Type II error?
- Explain the difference between L1 and L2 regularization.
- Write a program to solve a simulation of Conway’s game of life.
- What is the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning?
- What’s the difference between a generative and discriminative model?
- What’s the F1 score? How would you use it?
- What is your experience working on big data technologies?
- Do you have experience with Spark or big data tools for machine learning?
- How do you ensure you are not overfitting with a model?
Reflecting on the Question
The 800,000 businesses that Shopify powers generates massive amounts of data. The Data Science team at Shopify asks basic data science questions which are fundamental in nature. Sometimes, the questions revolve around your resume and the problems you have solved in your past career. Good grip on fundamentals can surely land you a job with the world’s largest e-commerce platform!
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The sole motivation of this blog article is to learn about Shopify and its technologies helping people to get into it. All data is sourced from online public sources. I aim to make this a living document, so any updates and suggested changes can always be included. Please provide relevant feedback.
