• Instacart is one of the fastest growing companies in e-commerce.
• Management gives opportunities for career advancement and professional growth
• There have been a lot of negative reviews from shoppers/drivers, which could affect the morale of other employees

The interview process for a software engineer can take 1-4 weeks.

Stage 1: Phone screen with recruiter
Stage 2: Phone interview with engineer
Stage 3: At-home coding tests (2)
Stage 4: Pair-programming technical exercise
Stage 5: Onsite interview
The onsite involves a code test to implement a specific app, pair programming, and behavioral questions about their values.
Stage 6: Meet with the CEO

The interview process for a data scientist can take 3-4 weeks.

Stage 1: Phone screen with recruiter
Stage 2: At-home code/data challenge
Stage 3: Technical phone interview
Stage 4: Onsite interview

No data

The interview process for a product manager can take 1-6 weeks.

Stage 1: Phone screen with recruiter
Stage 2: Take home product challenge
Stage 3: Onsite interview

• Within a few hours, implement an app from a specification.
• Implement a key-value datastore that supports querying for historic values. For every key there can be multiple values at different timestamps and it should support querying by only a key or by a key and timestamp.
• Describe a project where you had an impact.
• What was the most challenging project you worked on?
What was something you did wrong in a past role and how did you fix it?
Build a website with some required functionality.
Build a shopper site with analytics.
Implement a time-aware key/value store.
What is one of the technical challenges involved in implementing a key/value store with certain features?
Build a system to accept or reject payment.
What would happen if the entire database goes down, including replicas?
How would you describe your perfect workday?
Given the url for an http stream, perform some parsing until a solution is calculated.
Implement a given set of features to an application.
Consume a streaming HTTP feed, find a password in a block of characters with some provided coordinates.
Implement a key-value datastore that supports querying for historic values. For every key there can be multiple values at different timestamps, and it should support querying by a key only, or a key and timestamp.

• Talk about your past experiences.
• How might you have optimized parameters for this model differently?
• How would you tune a random forest?
• How would you staff the team based on delivery data?
How would you do power analysis for an A/B test?
When an item isn t available, what algorithm should we use to replace it?
What other products or revenue opportunities will arise from Instacart s data?
Write a script to format data in a text file.
Estimate the demand and supply in a given situation.
Given an OLTP system, which tracks the sales of items with order processing, returns and shipping, create a data warehouse model to find gross sales, net sales, and gross sales by product.
Given a movie database, identify whether a movie has a well defined genre.
How should we solve our supply / demand problems at Instacart?

• Why are you leaving your current company?

• You're the PM on a small cross-functional team at Instacart responsible for the Instacart mobile app our customers use. Our marketplace serves dense geographic areas in the US, but not all of them. Develop a consumer product that engages customers in markets where our current delivery product isn't available now, and will not be available within the next 2 years either. Create a short document to share your vision for this product. Why should the company build this product? What high level features does it have? What does success look like? Explain your vision and how you will execute on it.

Mission

At Instacart we aim to give our customers back their invaluable time so they can spend it doing the things they love with the people they love. Every minute counts.

• We take a lot of pride in our innovative problem solving and quality of service which stems from the values that we embody
• Ownership
• Sense of Urgency
• Do More
Customer Focus
Highest Standards
Resourcefulness
Backbone
Humility