I had a Skype call with the recruiter then an in person with him. That escalated to meeting one of the data analysts and a quick test of my python skills. The following week I had a Skype call with an analyst in Ottawa and the week after that I had an in person with two more people at the Toronto office. I thought all had gone well but in the end they decided to go with someone with more related experience. The interview process was very laid back and really personable. I was asked many questions about marketing and how I would use social media for data analytics though the feel was more of a mutual discussion and was informal. My expertise is advanced math so I just didn't have the whereabouts with some of these questions although I had really given the questions some serious thought-but I should have contacted some of my friends in marketing or read forums. My advice for someone wanting this job is, providing you are a cultural fit which is obviously highly valued at Shopify, be sure that you have researched relevant marketing/social media blogs, have a peripheral knowledge of many of the industry buzz words and be familiar, even if just by having done the tutorials, with hadoop, SQL, Pandas, Kaggle and be very proficient in python. You should have a Github account - my code is specialized and entirely esoteric and useless unfortunately :( (meant for Phd research). My sense is that they would hire somebody who is a great programmer but minimally abreast of the industry as long as they have at least apprised themselves of the current state of affairs in data and marketing and have done enough tutorials to be able to discuss the tools in use and know the basic hurdles of working with large data. My take away-which, if you're smart you'll learn from my mistake is this. I have a grad school ed in math and solid python skills but...I have to have more easily readable and applicable code (on Github) and do all the tutorials on hadoop, SQL, Kaggle, Scikit-learn and pick up some tricks in machine learning (ok maybe you do not need machine learning know how but if you want to do data you may as well start machine learning now and one of the analysts seems to really have an interest in it-plus it's really fun). Also have an active twitter account which conveys your personality. Incidentally, a week after my rejection, I am half way to having this background work done so do the leg work folks! These days, you need to have some skills before, not after being hired-education will not cut it. I also wish that I had demonstrated better what I had to offer...which is still quite substantial and would have made for a dynamic employee once I was up to speed on the tools. So be sure to have what they are looking for (I just told you!) and emphasize the extras you can offer!! Essentially, even if you are not a data expert, all of these suggestions I make will just contribute overall to demonstrating you have a passion for data; don't assume your skills speak for themselves. I was able to get a good take away from this process because they were so helpful after the fact. They gave me a really nice run down of what I can do to bolster my skills. Every company needs to make good hires and training is an investment but I think that especially in a start up you have to hit the ground running. Since salaries do not increase much, the human capital is bound to completely turn over every ten years unlike at large firms who can hire smart people, train them and then reap the benefits of their expertise and education through many promotions to come. I want to add that I think it's too easy for rejected candidates to complain about the process because it was long or they didn't get the call when they hoped they would. For the most part I received responses to my correspondence despite knowing that they are extremely busy. Further, I think the interview process should be judged positively if they treated you respectfully and you learned something from it. So regardless of not getting the job-I think it was well worth interviewing for and that is positive. I wish I had been given a solid run down of expectations before interviewing so remember-if you have intel on another job, please post!

I applied on their website which is the most quirky career site I have ever seen. They asked for things like your Twitter account, your GitHub account, the most interesting thing you saw recently on the Internet, samples of your projects, etc. You might want to work on these items to stand out. After about one week the recruiter emailed me to set up a phone interview. The recruiter was friendly and asked me about my background, they seemed to appreciate it if you contribute to projects on GitHub. The interview was pretty much a screening which last about 15 mins. One week after the interview the same guy emailed to inform me that I wasn't picked for the next round, which was not surprising since I understood that I was not a strong fit for this marketing-oriented role.