Coding round interview

These interviews are typically more difficult than an technical phone interview. The session will be platform agnostic and hosted via CodeSignal.

Instacart has 1–2 coding interviews that we would like you to complete. Each session is hosted by a different engineer from our team.

Our typical coding interviews run about a 1-hour long. The first 5 mins will be focused on intros and ensuring your laptop is set up. You’ll have 45-mins to complete the coding exercise. The last 10 mins will be for Q&A

What we look for: debugging skills, communication & presentation, overall language proficiency, modular design/ code readability/testable code, ability to follow specs

How to prepare: leetcode.

Technical/ Design

What to expect: these are interactive conversations where the interviewer will give you a scenario at Instacart that is related to ML. The goal is to come up with an end-to-end approach to implement the functionality/ You are also expected to explain the rationale behind your design, for example, the choices of models and metrics. You are welcome to use Google Draws, whiteboard, CodeSignal diagram tool (link provided by interview. Feel free to choose which every whiteboarding tool you feel most comfortable with

What we look for: communication of ideas, asking clarifying questions, clarifying and making necessary assumptions, etc. Discuss topics like model management and monitoring, performance, business needs, scale, datastore, etc. Ability to look at trade-offs and articulate various definitions and approaches

Project Retrospective

What to expect: this will be a deep dive into one project from your technical career and your role at the organizations that you’ve worked at. You may also be asked to talk about general experience, and what your interests are, and, looking ahead, where you want to direct your career.

We’ll want to dig into areas like a project you're proud of, challenges, and technical details from the project, the full process of shipping the product through to production, and the impact of the project on the user/team/business.

We want to understand your role on the project, and your ownership of tasks (and reports if relevant).

Your motivation, self-awareness, empathy for others, and ability to collaborate.

Your ability to thrive in a fast-paced, high-growth, minimal process environment

How to Prepare: select a recent project where you had the most impact, and start at a high level about business need, stakeholders, the structure of the team, and your role within the project.

Take the time to be introspective about your career and recall key events that have helped shape your career and have gotten you to where you are now.

Reflect on why you are interested in joining Instacart. What makes this opportunity appealing? How does it align with your other goals?

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Summary

Code: focus on code quality (naming, readable, debug, unit-tests, etc), less dynamic program, obscure data structure.

Design: end to end, trade-off, ask clarifying questions, communication skills.

Project Retrospective: most proud project, explain your contribution and key technical decisions, demonstrate your collaboration examples, and how you manage stakeholder expectations.