Why is it astounding? They have one of the biggest e-commerce applications in the world. A mobile app for shoppers. A payment system and mobile wallet app. A shipment tracking system. Tax and small business software. They have their own lending arm with its own software. They have multiple frameworks for other development teams to make super customizable e-commerce sites. They support Remix and Tailwind among other software. They have brick and mortar POS systems.

They are like multiple companies in one: Square, Etsy, aspects of Stripe, aspects of Squarespace/Wordpress. Idk I can see why they have a lot of people.

Plus they have an Amazon-scale infrastructure to manage...

I think Amazon is very much on another level in terms of scale. Not trying to be negative about Shopify — they have a very large system to maintain - but Amazon is just on another level.

Amazon don't seem release any figures but I've seen estimates of 50,000 to 100,000 engineers. They do have 1.576 million employees worldwide (2025 figure).

Yes but “Amazon-scale infra” as the grandparent mentions should absolutely include AWS, and Shopify is nowhere near that size.

Combined Shopify sales are ~half of Amazon's but growing quicker. Shopify probably supports more sales per engineer than Amazon's retail stack team.

Amazon also has AWS as infra though, they only do retail as a side gig

They also have enormous fulfillment services. Shopify doesn't handle that part.

They also have video and music streaming. And Kindle Unlimited.

Shopify is not far behind Amazon (the e-com business). It's network sees as many unique visitors as Amazon, though I imagine Amazon has more sessions per visitor, but the GMV across Shopify is just shy of half of Amazon. It's still in the same ball park.

What metic are you using? Shopify takes an average of ~$1bn at checkout daily while Amazon is over 2bn.

Yes, Shopify GMV is roughly half of Amazon.

>I asked for feedback

Even if they gave you feedback I think you would have to take it with a pinch of salt.

Hiring decisions are more emotional than most people would admit.

Even an emotional feedback could be potentially useful for self-improvement. Asking doesn't hurt.

I think you overestimate the competence of interviewers. They could well give you terrible advice

I agree, but I don't have to take it at face value either. It is just one data point after all. Usually I am interviewing in many places.

Most companies avoid this for liability reasons

I had an eerily similar experience interviewing at a similar public SaaS co recently.