J'ai postulé via un recruteur. J'ai passé un entretien chez Instacart
Entretien
Up till the phone interview everything was great: the recruiter was friendly, the engineer who conducted the phone interview was great. The onsite round was polar opposite. The recruiter changed and the new recruiter was mechanical and on the "onsite prep" call, read from a script and avoided answering clarifying questions. Like several other people have mentioned, the coding rounds were not interviews, rather observations on a code pair tool with no debugging support. The behavioural round was a rapid fire question round and my system design round was given by an engineering manager.
Overall, seemed the company, being new and in focus a lot lately, is still trying to figure out the interview process.
My two cents of advice would be (1) treat your candidates as your customers, make them feel good about the experience. It doesn't hurt to be nice, (2) do not have a manager give system design interviews. A system design has way too many nuances and engineering experience matters in understanding them, (3) the coding interview doesn't need to be an observation. If the goal is to see if the candidate can write a lot of clean and understandable code within a short period of time, give them the option to use an IDE, that's the natural coding environment. Also coding is a very learn-able skill and typically senior candidates will code slower, just some things to keep in mind and (4) recruiters could be a little more professional and personable. I understand you all are probably very busy but again, doesn't hurt to be nice and treat candidates as your customers.
I'm sure it's easier to grade applicants with AI, but it'd be nice to have humans involved in the interview process, too. You'll face a couple of AI powered coding challenges. The bigger problems are the ethical implications here after looking into how the company works, with variable pricing based on data on how badly they can screw the consumer with upcharges and how to keep money in their pockets rather than the shoppers & drivers
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
If you could replace your family with AI, would you do it?
J'ai postulé en ligne. J'ai passé un entretien chez Instacart (San Francisco, CA) en févr. 2026
Entretien
First there is a codesignal test. This is for 90 minutes and felt frantic. Way too many features/code paths to implement.
Then there is the karat llm interview which is 50 minutes.
Then a full day of regular interview loop.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
For CodeSignal it was implementing a cache key store with timestamps. Started with basic setting and getting, then evolved into more advanced code. 4 different parts. Writing a lot of code for this.
For the LLM interview you work with a company called Karat. You are giving an VS code like workspace and an ai to help. You have 50 minutes. They then dump a large project in your space. For me it was a bus route simulator.
I was then asked to implement a feature : Have the system prioritize Priority Pass people. I used the LLM to track down the code and implement it, but it was difficult to test in code that is unknown to me. The next feature was implementing wheelchairs for the bus which requires special capacity checks.
J'ai postulé en ligne. Le processus a pris 4 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien chez Instacart (Toronto, ON) en févr. 2025
Entretien
1. Online OA with codesignal to start with. Very standard and not hard
2. Got the 4 interview rounds and you can always divide into 2 parts of 2 interviews each. It was be 2 codesignals with medium difficulty and I managed to do both. One system design which was average for me and interviewer was okay as well. Behavioural round was standard. No wonder why I didn't manage to get the offer.