Prepare for Instacart with a focused mix of coding, design, and communication. Start with your job description and confirm the interview loop with your recruiter.
01 / MAKE YOUR NEXT SESSION COUNT
Given customers and orders, return each customer’s most recent order while retaining customers with no orders. Define a tie-breaker for equal timestamps.
Correct joins, deterministic results, null handling, and a useful index.
Design a notification service. Clarify delivery guarantees, model the data, then handle retries and duplicate events.
Clear requirements, a working baseline, and explicit trade-offs.
Describe a technical decision you changed after receiving feedback. Explain your contribution and the outcome.
Specific actions, honest reflection, and measurable impact.
BEFORE YOU PRACTICE
Get the details that a generic company guide cannot know.
Company-linked challenges and related lessons from our library. Not a prediction of your interview.
Aggregated from candidate submissions and public sources.
Historical figures from existing records; date and location may be unspecified. Verify current ranges on Levels.fyi.
Engineer
Not Available
Senior Engineer
$306,750
$161,750 base · $142,500 stock · $2,500 bonus
Staff Engineer
Not Available
Senior Staff Engineer
Not Available
Principal Engineer
Not Available
Reviews originally posted on Glassdoor.
Instacart is a fast-moving company pursuing a long-neglected industry (grocery shopping). The team is incredibly inclusive and everyone's opinions are not just respected, but actively sought after. There are a number of big things in the works which I am looking forward to watching and being a part of in the next 1-3 years. Instacart is pursuing a very complex set of problems and is currently understaffed to meet its goals effectively. This problem is not unknown to the executive team and our hiring goals have been set with this consideration in mind. Even so, the hiring team itself is understaffed. I foresee this being one of the biggest limiting factors of growth for some time to come.
Really excellent company to work for. Good work culture. Keep aiming high, keep dreaming and keep hiring. Lack of mentorship. Now only recently put an emphasis on the on boarding experience. High level of autonomy and ownership. An environment where you can make things happen if you chase them.
Blend of scale but nimble-ness, flexibility to do and learn what you want, genuinely nice people, cush office amenities. . don't need to worry about food. . IC's got all your eating needs covered, people that invest in others. Gotta learn that RoR, some people get us confused with IG, a great service that gets ratched press. Just gotta keep pushing the name and get out in the community so folks know what a special placed this is to build a career at.
The sky is the limit. There are so many cool things we can do, hard problems to solve, and impact to make. You won't get bored here. Big focus on career development. Lot's of learning, an allowance for books and conferences, growing company with new positions opening up. Creating jobs for shoppers, getting groceries to elderly, disabled, and busy families, helping brick & mortar companies.
We solve really hard problems and utilize everyone's unique skill set. Engineers have a fair amount of flexibility on which projects they work on and the role they play -- your business and product ideas are valued. Our work is meaningful -- we help millions of elderly, disabled, busy families, and others with groceries while employing tens of thousands of people. The company is headed to a great place and it's awesome helping us to get there. We should be much more proactive with the press. Our successes aren't well enough known and we're letting the media get away with a pessimistic spin that can hurt our ability to hire great employees, attract customers, and even raise funding. Just because we know it's BS isn't enough.