Shopify

Fall cohort is noticeably smaller than summer so you get more direct time with senior engineers. Worked on storefront rendering perf and it actually shipped before the term ended. Toronto in the fall is great for hybrid, coming in 3 days a week felt like the right balance.

Payments team is high stakes in a way most backend work isn't. The code I was writing touched money movement for hundreds of thousands of merchants. Fall cohort is smaller which meant more direct time with senior engineers than I expected.

Got to build churn prediction models that the merchant success team actually used, which felt good. The data infrastructure is mature, you're not fighting bad tooling, everything kind of just works. Nice change from academic projects where you set everything up yourself.

Shopify mobile ships to millions of merchants so the stakes feel real. Android team uses Jetpack Compose throughout and the codebase is well organized for its size. Shipped a settings flow change that went out to all Android merchants before I left.

First real industry job and a solid one. The Shopify mobile app has millions of merchants on it so shipping anything to prod felt meaningful. Weekly 1:1s with my manager were actually useful, not just status updates. Pay was good for a winter co-op.

The autonomy is real. Shipped a feature that moved checkout conversion by ~0.8% which sounds tiny but at Shopify's scale that actually matters. Everyone I worked with was approachable and I felt like a real employee from the first week, not just an intern they're babysitting.