Interviewed here in Jan 2023 for a Senior Software Engineer position. The process was quite lengthy.

First, an interview with Karat. This included an introduction (3-5m), general programming knowledge questions (15m), and a coding challenge consisting of several parts (30m). It felt very rushed, and the interviewer was not an Instacart employee.

Next was the virtual onsite. This comprised four interview sessions, which could be broken into two days. In no particular order, these included:

• Two more coding challenges
• System design
• Bar raiser

Even though they were looking for someone with deep knowledge of Ruby/Rails, none of the interviewers knew Ruby. There was no deep-dive Rails interview either. Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but having three coding challenge interviews for a senior engineer is a waste of time. If you're a college grad without much real-world experience, then yes, but otherwise, there's so much more important stuff senior engineers can discuss.

Following that was the final round with the hiring manager and direct manager. Expect questions about past projects, processes, conflict resolution, etc. This is also the time for you to finally ask questions about the company, team, and so on.

Overall, there were six 1-hour interviews and two 30-minute calls with a recruiter.

What upset me about interviewing with Instacart is that even after making it through all the rounds and being a great potential fit (almost a decade working with an almost identical technology stack, in the same food/grocery delivery industry, and using the same tooling), they rejected me with a standard "not a fit, please monitor our Careers site" email. I asked for more feedback, but they never got back to me. This felt very disrespectful and says a lot about how you'd be treated if you did get an offer. Don't make the same mistake; stay away.

Signed NDA.

Practice easy/medium LeetCode questions with arrays, strings, maps, and recursions.