Instacart·Data Scientist

Instacart Data Scientist interview experience

No offer

Medium

Negative

United StatesPosted Apr 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My experience started with what felt like a straightforward technical conversation, but it didn’t have a welcoming vibe.

After an HR-related step, I did a 45-minute technical interview focused on statistics and SQL. The SQL portion wasn’t really about writing brand-new queries from scratch as much as spotting errors on SQL queries and reasoning about what was wrong.

The interviewer from the start didn’t really try to set a friendly tone, and the whole thing felt a bit cold. I also found myself thinking that the way they handled “coding” made sense for LLM-era interviews: instead of evaluating perfectly written output, they seemed more interested in whether I could detect bad results and correct direction when

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