Instacart·Software Engineer

Instacart Software Engineer interview experience

No offer

Hard

Negative

San Francisco, CAPosted Mar 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

After a recruiter kickoff, I hit a CodeSignal test that took about 90 minutes and felt wildly frantic.

The prompt seemed to hide a lot of complexity because there were too many features and code paths to build out under time pressure. When that wrapped, I moved into a language-model style interview on a Karat session that lasted 50 minutes.

That was followed by a full day of the regular loop. Even though I kept showing progress, the structure of the day made everything feel high-stakes and tightly paced, and I didn’t end up getting an offer.

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