Instacart·Software Engineer

Instacart Software Engineer interview experience

Medium

Neutral

Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My journey started with a recruiter conversation, and after that I had two live coding rounds.

In the first one, I was asked to decode a password. I worked through it quickly, and the interviewer stayed friendly, even talking about how the code could be refactored to be production-ready.

The second coding round was more algorithmic. I worked on a problem called “Find Minimal Shoppers.” I had to reason about binary search alongside a heap-style simulation, and I solved it successfully. That part felt solid, but my overall experience was tarnished by the Karat round. The interviewer moved very quickly, and the AI-generated answers were lengthy enough that it was genuinely hard to keep

Create a free Dataford account to unlock the full round-by-round breakdown, the questions asked and the outcome.

Read the full report Read the full report

Preparing for this interview?

Instacart Software Engineer interview guideThe full process, round by round, with the question bank Practice Software Engineer interview questionsReal questions from this role across companies All Instacart interview guidesEvery role we cover at this company