I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Instacart in Mar 2019
Interview
Pretty typically meat market recruiter but especially apathetic engineer on the phone screen.
I found the listing on LinkedIn. Recruiter reached out for a quick phone call.
Pretty typical sales jargon about the company going to the moon. Then the technical phone screen.
I had almost the exact same experience as the other guy who wrote about his experience from Sept '18. Found myself on a call with a standoff-ish guy.
He pasted the question on HackerRank IDE and pretty much just sat in silence. I tried to get him involved by asking questions and feedback but would reply with single sentence responses.
I chugged along, finishing the problem in about 35 minutes. I made a couple of syntax errors mostly from being nervous but overall didn't have any difficulty writing up an efficient solution.
I asked several times if there was anything I was missing or he wanted me to expand on. Same tepid response of just "no." So I thought I was in the clear. Apparently my mistake. If you learn anything from me, make sure you don't take the lack of feedback, even when your code is working, to be a positive thing.
We had 15 minutes left of the scheduled call so I asked if I could ask questions. He told me I had 5 minutes. I asked a few questions about teams and culture. He responded, un-energetically. End of call.
Afterwards, I felt pretty good about it, given the code was working, we finished before the allotted time, and the interviewer had little to no push back. So I was expecting a positive outcome.
I was wrong. After two business days, I get an email from a "no-reply@" email stating "we've gone with a stronger candidate."
Confused, I reached out to the recruiter to thank her for her time and asked for any feedback, especially given the big gap in how I felt I'd performed. Not to my surprised, not as much as a courtesy response. Some kind of acknowledgement and appreciation for my time would be nice.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Problem broken into three phases
1. create a hash like data structure class that handles get and set.
2. Allow key to hold many values with each value having a timestamp. if get receives just they key, return latest value. If get receives both key and time, return the appropriate value.
3. modify get to return closest value with timestamp lesser than argument timestamp.
I applied online. I interviewed at Instacart (Toronto, ON)
Interview
I had a couple of interview rounds with Instacart. Overall, I think it went pretty well, except for one round that didn’t feel as strong. I asked for feedback afterward, but unfortunately they didn’t share any. The system design and algorithm questions were manageable, especially if you’re familiar with LeetCode-style problems. One thing I really appreciated is that they clearly explain what to expect in each interview round ahead of time, which helps a lot with preparation.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One of the rounds was behavioral — they asked questions based on my resume and also about how I work and behave in a team environment.
Four long rounds and ghosted after the interview, even though all technical assessments went well. Tedious process but they do give you a gift card as a compensation for your time and effort.
I applied online. I interviewed at Instacart (Toronto, ON) in Jul 2025
Interview
2 rounds of 60 min coding sessions, a 1hr break after that, 45 min behavioural round, and then an easy system design round for 60 mins. Questions were pretty straight forward and easy. Second coding round has data structures involved, first one is just parsing thru dictionaries. Could not finish the second part of the second coding round. Behavioural interviewer has a dull personality and sort of killed the vibe. Otherwise I did really well on every round but still didn’t get the offer. Looking at Reddit, seems like many people had the same experience and were surprised to not get the offer so I don’t know if it’s worth your time interviewing here.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
[coding round 2]: you have one shopper and multiple orders of varying start times and durations. Calculate the average wait times.