Perspectives on Onboarding: Joining Shopify as an Engineering Leader

Summary

Shopify’s onboarding program is presented as an alternative to the common first-day experience of receiving a laptop, documents, and a team without enough context. It gives new engineers, including engineering leaders, a structured period of roughly six weeks to learn the product, merchants, engineering practices, and company values, including by creating test shops and using the admin. Avanti Ketkar and Maria Robledo describe how this preparation helped them connect onboarding content to later work, ship a pull request after using a test shop, and build relationships and trust in a remote environment. Their accounts also cover the adjustment to learning before delivering impact, moving from a .NET background to Ruby and Rails, managing time zones, and keeping technical craft relevant while leading teams.

Context

New-to-the-company engineering leaders may lack context about Shopify’s culture, product, development tools, processes, and relationships, making it difficult to lead confidently and become impactful quickly. The program is intended to reduce that ramp-up time while helping new leaders build context, relationships, and trust.

Approach / What changed

Shopify provides an intentional onboarding experience lasting about six weeks. New hires learn about the product, merchants, business functions, engineering practices, mission, and values; create test shops; receive coaching and manager support; build internal relationships; and get guidance on technical craft, remote work, time zones, and asynchronous communication.

Takeaways

• New hires create test shops and use Shopify’s admin to understand the merchant journey and build product empathy before joining their teams.
• Onboarding prioritizes learning and relationship-building before immediate delivery, with managers, colleagues, and coaches helping new leaders adjust to that expectation.
• Remote engineering leaders are advised to build intentional one-on-one relationships, communicate asynchronously across time zones, and maintain technical craft to strengthen team trust.

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