I saw a posting for a Rails Engineer position in a developer newsletter. I emailed my resume and received a code challenge from HackerRank. It was pretty simple and then I had a call with an engineer, who asked me pretty standard questions about my background and why I was interested in Instacart.

I then received a longer code challenge that involved building a Rails application. There were two parts to the challenge:

• One more frontend-focused.
• The other more backend, analytics-focused.

It's certainly challenging, and you need to be careful about which parts of the app you spend your time on.

After that, I was put in touch with a recruiter, who told me more about the company and scheduled a time for me to come to the office for an onsite. During the onsite, I did a pair programming challenge that was fairly simple. Then I talked to their Head of Design, Software Engineering Team Lead Manager, and VP of Engineering.

The talks with the Head of Design and VP of Engineering weren't technical, but the Engineering Team Manager did ask me to whiteboard how I might implement a certain feature for a web app, from the backend models to the frontend, and asked how I might ensure fast performance.

In the end, I didn't get an offer but received good feedback on the areas I needed to improve in.

One of the technical challenges involved implementing a key/value store with certain features.