Instacart Software Engineer interview experience

The overall vibe matched the difficulty of the questions—high standards, very comparable to the tougher big-tech loops I’d seen before. During the coding parts, the interviewers didn’t really coach me or offer hints if I got stuck, which made the whole experience feel less like a conversation and more like an assessment.

The system design portion caught me off guard in a different way. It seemed to assume I already understood Instacart’s personal shopping process and preferences, and I didn’t feel like that context was something I could fairly be expected to “just know.” By the end, I came