I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart in Sep 2020
Interview
The first round was phone screen with the recruiter, followed by a coding interview. During the coding interview, the interviewer was not interested and was working on the side. While I was explaining the solution, he wasn't listening and at one point said he accidentally had muted me. Very unprofessional. The solution was correct as per this interviewer (idk if he really looked at anything I did) but I was later rejected.
I applied online. I interviewed at Instacart (New York, NY) in Jun 2026
Interview
Started with HM interview, then Recruiter, then VO. HM was nice, and didn't ask many questions, just some background. Recruiter was incredibly unprofessional and didn't even show up to the scheduled meeting. Showed no respect for my time at all. I should have known it was a bad sign. As expected, they ghosted me after the VO.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Come up with a metric for this problem? Why is it a good metric compared to other metrics like Recall or Classification error?
Also had a coding round. Coding round was quite tough. I wasn't well prepared.
The phone screen was surprisingly short, only about 20 minutes, focusing on my background and some general ML concepts. Then came the technical round where I had to design a ranking model for Instacart’s search results. Midway through, it hit me that I had just practiced a very similar problem on PracHub, which made me feel a bit more confident. However, the depth of the discussion, especially around metrics and cold-start items, was intense. In the end, I didn’t receive an offer, but it was a decent experience overall.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart (Toronto, ON) in Sep 2025
Interview
1 round of HR screen, 4 rounds of technical
Technical:
- ML alg knowledge
- Live code - Leetcode style
- Case study: they give you a case
- Retro study: walk them through a past project