What Shopify Interns Actually Do

Engineering internships exist to bridge the gap between classroom theory and production reality. Shopify’s program runs three application cycles per year, with internships spanning three to eight months across front-end, back-end, infrastructure, data engineering, and mobile development. The company shifted to a fully virtual model, and early signs suggest it works: 98% of respondents in the latest intern satisfaction survey said they would recommend the program to peers.

Interns own real projects and are expected to make meaningful decisions, not just shadow senior developers. The work is supported by mentors, ad hoc stakeholder meetings, and the same collaboration tools full-time staff use. For candidates wondering whether a remote internship can match an in-office experience, former intern Alex Montague reports he was “just as productive, if not more so” working from home, citing that the tooling made remote collaboration routine.

The Application Roadmap

Shopify breaks its hiring process into four distinct stages. Knowing what each one involves can save you from avoidable missteps.

1. Find the Right Posting

Internships are posted on the Early Careers page and include three, four, and eight-month paid programs. For Fall 2022, applications open in May 2022. Joining the Shopify Early Talent Community will trigger a notification when the window opens.

2. Submit the Online Application

The application itself asks for standard material: resume, cover letter, contact details, education status, LinkedIn profile, and personal website. You will also face an Intern Challenge tied to the discipline you are applying for. Treat this as your first technical showcase—if you have built something with Ruby on Rails or another relevant stack, this is where it belongs.

3. Expect a Skills Challenge

Depending on the specialization, the recruiter may ask for a link to a personal project or a coding exercise on GitHub. Challenges vary, but common formats include designing a Shopify store or solving a problem with Python or Ruby on Rails. Specificity matters more than perfection; the goal is to demonstrate genuine interest in the subject matter.

4. Move Through Two Interview Phases

The first phase is the Life Story interview, a two-sided conversation covering both your professional and personal trajectory. The second phase assesses technical ability: you receive a challenge and must propose a technical solution. Practice matters here—former intern Elio Hasrouni attributes his success to mapping out the pivotal moments in his life before the Life Story interview, from his first coding experience to his entry into software engineering.

Core Competencies Shopify Screens For

When Shopify’s engineering team asked its followers on Twitter which skills matter most for interns, over 100 hiring managers and engineers responded. The recurring themes map directly onto how the company evaluates candidates.

Collaboration

Technical prowess is only part of the job. As one respondent put it, “tech is a small part of software engineering, the valuable part is working well in teams.” Former intern Emily Liu worked with a core team spread across five countries; time zones did not slow the group’s progress toward a shared objective.

Continuous Learning

Shopify explicitly lists lifelong learning as a value and a success metric. One Twitter response stressed that candidates should “always be willing to learn, to adapt, and to accept help,” adding that even senior developers can learn from an intern. Former intern Andrea Herscovich echoed this, framing the company culture as one that prizes impact and growth over everything else.

Curiosity

Hiring managers cite curiosity as a scarce but essential trait in a field with rapid technological turnover. Herscovich credits her own curiosity with shaping her internship path, including a stint contributing to Polaris, Shopify’s open-source design system, where she learned to design for a broader audience rather than a single use case.

GitHub Proficiency

Public work trumps grades. One Twitter user put it bluntly: “I don't care if you got an A+ or C- in compilers; I'm going to look at your GitHub (or other public work) to see if you've been applying what you learned.” Former intern Kelly Ma used GitHub to work through a mentor-provided list of challenges, which led her to interact with people outside her immediate team and build new relationships.

Remote Work Readiness

Distributed engineering is not a temporary experiment. Interns gain direct experience with the collaboration stack Shopify uses internally—Google Hangouts for meetings, Tuple for pair programming, Figma for brainstorming, Slack for chat, and GitHub for discussion. Montague noted these tools made remote work feel normal and kept him highly productive.

Communication

One Twitter follower warned that “nothing in CS you learn will be more important than how to communicate with humans.” Interns get structured opportunities to develop written, visual, and nonverbal communication through the same channels used by full-time staff.

Interview Readiness

“Practice interviewing. This is a skill,” was a recurring piece of advice. The Life Story interview is not a casual chat; it is a deliberate attempt to understand your motivations and how Shopify can support your growth. Preparing concrete life events and career inflection points in advance will serve you well.

Accountability

Owning your mistakes—and you will make them—is part of the job. Ma suggests stretch goals as a concrete accountability mechanism. She credits Shopify with pushing her to own a project goal for a full six-week cycle, which meant convening stakeholders in ad hoc meetings, updating GitHub issues, and figuring out how to find the right context on her own.

Ways to Stand Out Before You Apply

Competition for these roles is intense. A few deliberate steps can meaningfully improve your odds.

  • Practice sample challenges. Shopify publishes example Intern Challenges for backend, general developer, and UX/web developer roles. Working through them mirrors the format you will face and sharpens the skills being tested.
  • Assemble a portfolio. Prior experience is not required, but a curated set of past projects relevant to the role will separate you from candidates who only submit a resume. This is your chance to demonstrate what you can build.
  • Research the company. Before applying, review Shopify’s product, mission, and values. Alignment between their goals and your own is a necessary ingredient for success in the program.

Going Deeper: What Interns Actually Build

Shopify's engineering blog offers a substantial back catalog of posts that give a more concrete picture of what interns do once they're in the program. The "Enable Our Interns to Make an Impact" post describes the structural side of the internship, including how mentorship and project ownership are organized. The "Tips for Success" post is written directly by former interns and covers the practical habits that helped them navigate their terms. A third post on intern growth details how Shopify pairs challenge with practice to help developers develop.

For a look at specific projects, the kubectl plugin for Kubernetes ingress-nginx post is a good starting point. It was written by an intern and details building a plugin to manage the ingress-nginx controller. Another intern-authored post covers releasing 3 terabytes of storage before BFCM, which gets into the logistics of shipping infrastructure changes under a high-traffic deadline. The remaining posts are deeper technical dives—writing safer code with Sorbet for type safety, iterating toward a more scalable ingress, and implementing dynamic ProxySQL query rules—that show the kind of production-grade infrastructure work interns are expected to own.