The process began with a phone interview with a recruiter, who was very nice.

Next was the technical screen. The interviewer barely spoke throughout the entire session, and their Slack and laptop notifications were constantly disruptive. I had to politely mention that it was distracting. They literally did not speak the entire time, and I wasn't even sure they were paying attention.

The on-site interview was a straight five hours, with only a 30-minute break in the middle. This included two more coding challenges, one behavioral/bar raiser interview, and a system design interview.

The system design and bar raiser interviews were okay. However, with the coding questions, the interviewers were again silent, and it was difficult to tell if they were paying attention. I'm not sure why Instacart interviewers seem to do this. Not every engineer is adept at conducting interviews. They were awkward, and when I tried to be conversational about my work and thought process, the interviewer remained completely silent.

TL;DR: The coding portion of the interview was poor due to the interviewers.

Furthermore, why are three coding interviews necessary? Each one presents a standard LeetCode-style question. This approach is redundant and exhausting.

By the end of the interview, I was mentally exhausted.

I recommend asking to split the on-site interview into multiple days, an option I learned was available after the fact.

Key value storage and retrieval

Coordinate matching

Expression evaluation