I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart in Aug 2021
Interview
Starts with a phone interview with a recruiter and they were really nice. Then technical screen where the interviewer barely said a word the entire time and their slack and laptop notifications were going off non stop, I had to politely mention that it was distracting. They literally did not speak the entire time, I wasn't even sure they were paying attention at all.
The on site interview was 5 more hours straight with a small 30 minute break in the middle. This included 2 more coding challenges and 1 behaviour/bar raiser interview and a system design interview. The system design interview and bar raiser were ok. Again with the coding question the interviewers were silent and you could barely tell they were paying attention. I'm not sure why Instacart interviewers seem to do this. Not every engineer is good at conducting interviews. They are awkward and when you're trying to be conversational about what you're working on and your thought process the interviewer is dead silent.
TL;DR The coding part of the interview sucked because of poor interviewers.
Also why are 3 coding interviews necessary? Each one is just another Leetcode style question. It's redundant and exhausting.
By the end of the interview I was pretty mentally exhausted.
I recommend asking to split the onsite interview into multiple days, an option I learnt was available after the fact.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Key value storage and retrieval
Coordinate matching
Expression evaluation
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 July 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.