What is a Research Analyst at Instacart?

As a Research Analyst at Instacart, you are at the center of one of the most complex, dynamic marketplace models in the tech industry. Instacart operates a multi-sided marketplace connecting customers, personal shoppers, retail partners, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands. Your role is to make sense of the massive volume of data generated by these interactions and translate it into actionable product and business strategies.

The impact of this position is immense. You will uncover insights that directly influence how users navigate the app, how efficiently shoppers fulfill orders, and how retailers optimize their inventory. Whether you are analyzing cart conversion rates, evaluating the success of a new search algorithm, or identifying friction points in the shopper onboarding funnel, your research will drive critical decisions across the organization.

You will partner closely with product managers, engineers, and data scientists to define success metrics and evaluate experiment results. This role requires a unique blend of technical data extraction skills, deep product intuition, and the ability to communicate complex findings to stakeholders who rely on your insights to steer the business.

Common Interview Questions

The questions below represent the patterns and themes frequently encountered by candidates for the Research Analyst role at Instacart. While you should not memorize answers, use these to practice your structured thinking and technical speed.

SQL and Technical Execution

These questions test your ability to quickly and accurately manipulate data. Expect around 8 questions in your technical screen, ranging from basic aggregations to moderate complexity.

• Write a SQL query to find the top 5 customers by total spend in the last 30 days.
• How would you write a query to calculate the week-over-week retention rate of new users?
• Given an orders table and a refunds table, write a query to find the refund rate per retailer.
• Write a query to identify shoppers who have completed more than 100 deliveries but have an average rating below 4.5.
• How do you handle duplicate records and NULL values in your SQL joins?

Product Sense and Business Logic

These questions evaluate your understanding of Instacart's business model and how you apply data to solve product challenges.

• How would you measure the success of the "Replacement Options" feature when an item is out of stock?
• If overall order volume is down 10% week-over-week, how would you structure your investigation?
• What metrics would you use to evaluate the health of the shopper ecosystem in a specific city?
• Walk me through how you would design an A/B test for a new checkout flow.
• How do you balance metrics that might conflict, such as increasing customer discounts versus maintaining retailer margins?

Behavioral and Past Experience

These questions assess your communication skills, your ability to handle stakeholders, and your cultural fit with the team.

• Tell me about a time your data analysis contradicted a Product Manager's intuition. How did you handle it?
• Describe a complex analysis you performed. How did you explain the results to a non-technical audience?
• Tell me about a project where you had to deal with messy or incomplete data.
• Why are you interested in joining Instacart, and what challenges do you think our marketplace faces today?
• Describe a time you had to work under a tight deadline to deliver critical business insights.

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Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for the Research Analyst interview requires a strategic approach. Instacart evaluates candidates not just on their ability to write code, but on their capacity to solve ambiguous business problems using data.

Technical Fluency and Execution – You must demonstrate strong proficiency in SQL and data manipulation. Interviewers will evaluate your ability to quickly and accurately extract data, join complex tables, and aggregate metrics under time constraints. You can demonstrate strength here by writing clean, optimized queries without hesitation.

Product and Business Sense – This measures your understanding of Instacart's unique marketplace dynamics. Interviewers want to see if you understand the trade-offs between customer satisfaction, shopper efficiency, and retailer profitability. Strong candidates proactively tie their data insights back to core business metrics like Gross Transaction Value (GTV) and retention.

Communication and Stakeholder Management – As an analyst, your insights are only as good as your ability to explain them. You will be evaluated on how clearly you can present your findings, justify your methodological choices, and handle pushback from cross-functional partners.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for a Research Analyst at Instacart is designed to quickly assess your baseline technical skills before diving into your behavioral and product alignment. You will typically begin with a 30-minute phone screen with a recruiter to discuss your background, timeline, and basic alignment with the role's requirements.

Following the recruiter screen, you will face a dedicated SQL assessment. This is usually a time-boxed exercise featuring around 8 questions that range from easy to medium difficulty. Accuracy and speed are critical here, as this stage acts as a strict technical gate. If you successfully navigate the assessment, you will move on to a 30-minute interview with the hiring manager. This conversation blends behavioral questions, a review of your past projects, and an assessment of your product sense.

Hiring managers at Instacart operate in a highly fast-paced environment. During the hiring manager round, expect a direct, no-nonsense communication style. The focus will be heavily on your actual output, your ability to handle ambiguity, and how you would approach real-world data challenges within their specific team.

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This visual timeline outlines the typical progression from your initial recruiter screen through the technical assessments and hiring manager rounds. Use this to structure your preparation timeline, focusing heavily on SQL speed early on, and shifting toward behavioral and product-sense narratives as you approach the hiring manager and final rounds. Note that the exact flow may vary slightly depending on the specific team or geographic location.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

To succeed as a Research Analyst, you must excel across several distinct competencies. Instacart interviews are practical; they want to see how you would perform on the job on day one.

SQL and Data Extraction

Your ability to independently pull and manipulate data is non-negotiable. The technical assessment will test your foundational SQL knowledge and your ability to translate a business question into a functional query. Strong performance means writing syntax-perfect SQL quickly and understanding edge cases (e.g., handling nulls or duplicates).

Be ready to go over:

• Aggregations and Grouping – Using GROUP BY, HAVING, and aggregate functions to summarize user behaviors.
• Complex Joins – Combining customer, order, and shopper tables accurately.
• Window Functions – Using ROW_NUMBER(), RANK(), and LEAD()/LAG() to track sequential user actions or session data.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – CTEs (Common Table Expressions) for query readability, basic query optimization, and handling date/time functions specific to delivery windows.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Write a query to find the percentage of users who placed a second order within 7 days of their first order."
• "Given a table of shopper deliveries, calculate the rolling 3-day average of deliveries completed per shopper."
• "Identify the top 3 most frequently replaced items in customer grocery carts."

Product Analytics and Metric Design

Instacart expects analysts to understand the "why" behind the data. This area evaluates your ability to define success for a product feature and diagnose metric shifts. Strong candidates do not just list metrics; they prioritize them and explain the trade-offs.

Be ready to go over:

• Defining Success Metrics – Choosing primary, secondary, and guardrail metrics for new features.
• Root Cause Analysis – Systematically breaking down why a top-line metric (like daily active users or conversion rate) dropped.
• Marketplace Trade-offs – Understanding how a change benefiting the customer might negatively impact the shopper or retailer.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "If the cart abandonment rate spikes by 5% in one day, how would you investigate the cause?"
• "How would you measure the success of a new feature that allows customers to tip their shopper before delivery?"
• "What metrics would you look at to determine if a specific retail partner is performing well on our platform?"

Experimentation and A/B Testing

While data scientists often design complex algorithms, Research Analysts frequently run and evaluate A/B tests to inform product rollouts. You are expected to understand the statistical foundations of experimentation and how to interpret the results practically.

Be ready to go over:

• Hypothesis Formulation – Clearly stating what you are testing and the expected outcome.
• Test Design – Understanding sample size, duration, and randomization units (e.g., user-level vs. session-level).
• Interpreting Results – Analyzing statistical significance and making a launch recommendation.

Example questions or scenarios:

• "How long would you need to run an A/B test to detect a 2% lift in conversion rate?"
• "If an A/B test shows a significant increase in GTV but a decrease in shopper retention, what do you recommend to the product manager?"

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Key Responsibilities

As a Research Analyst at Instacart, your day-to-day involves acting as the analytical engine for your product or operations team. You will spend a significant portion of your time querying large datasets to extract behavioral trends, building dashboards in tools like Tableau or Looker to democratize data access, and running deep-dive analyses to answer specific strategic questions.

Collaboration is central to this role. You will work side-by-side with Product Managers to define the analytics roadmap for new features. When a product launches, you will monitor its performance, analyze A/B test results, and present your findings in cross-functional meetings. Your deliverables will range from quick, ad-hoc data pulls to comprehensive slide decks that narrate the user journey and highlight areas of friction.

You will also partner with Engineering and Data Engineering teams to ensure data quality and proper event logging. If a new button is added to the app, you are responsible for ensuring its usage is tracked correctly so you can analyze it later. Ultimately, your responsibility is to ensure that Instacart makes objective, data-informed decisions that balance the needs of its complex multi-sided marketplace.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

To be a highly competitive candidate for the Research Analyst position, you need a strong blend of technical execution and business acumen. Instacart looks for candidates who can operate independently and drive projects from data extraction to strategic recommendation.

• Must-have skills – Expert-level SQL proficiency is required. You must also have strong experience with data visualization tools (like Tableau, Looker, or Mode) and a deep understanding of product analytics, metric design, and A/B testing fundamentals. Strong communication skills are essential to translate data into business strategy.
• Nice-to-have skills – Proficiency in Python or R for more advanced statistical analysis or data manipulation is highly valued. Previous experience working in a multi-sided marketplace (like ride-sharing, food delivery, or e-commerce) will give you a significant advantage in understanding the business logic.

Strong candidates typically bring 2 to 5 years of experience in an analytics, data science, or product research role, ideally within a fast-paced tech or e-commerce environment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How difficult is the SQL assessment? The SQL assessment is generally considered to be of average difficulty, consisting of easy to medium questions. However, the challenge lies in the time limit. You must be able to write accurate syntax quickly without relying heavily on trial and error.

Q: What is the most important thing to focus on during preparation? Focus heavily on mastering SQL joins, aggregations, and window functions for the technical screen. For the hiring manager round, prioritize structuring your answers to product questions—always tie your data insights back to the core business impact.

Q: What is the interviewing style of Hiring Managers at Instacart? Hiring Managers are highly results-oriented and may have a fast-paced, direct interviewing style. Do not be discouraged if they seem hurried or stoic; remain confident, stick to your structured answers, and drive the energy of the conversation yourself.

Q: How long does the entire interview process usually take? The process typically moves quickly. From the initial recruiter screen to the final decision, candidates usually complete the process within 3 to 5 weeks, depending on scheduling availability and the urgency of the role.

Other General Tips

• Master the Marketplace Dynamics: Always remember that Instacart is a complex ecosystem. When answering product questions, explicitly mention how a change impacts the customer, the shopper, and the retailer. Showing empathy for all sides of the marketplace sets top candidates apart.
• Speed and Accuracy in SQL: During the timed SQL test, do not overcomplicate your queries. Stick to standard, readable SQL. Practice on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank using medium-difficulty database questions while timing yourself.

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• Drive the Conversation: If your interviewer seems distracted or impatient, do not lose your composure. Keep your answers concise, use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to stay on track, and confidently highlight your impact.
• Clarify Before Querying: In live technical or case interviews, never jump straight into the solution. Take 30 seconds to repeat the prompt, clarify edge cases (e.g., "Are we looking at unique users or total sessions?"), and outline your approach before you begin.

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Summary & Next Steps

Securing a Research Analyst role at Instacart is an exciting opportunity to work on high-impact, data-rich challenges within a massive, dynamic marketplace. Your ability to extract clean data, interpret complex user behaviors, and confidently advise product leaders will make you a vital asset to the company.

To succeed, ensure your SQL skills are sharp and fast, and practice framing your analytical insights around core business metrics. Remember to stay composed and confident throughout the process, even if the pace feels rapid or the interviewers are highly direct. Focused preparation on marketplace trade-offs and structured communication will significantly elevate your performance.

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This salary module provides aggregated compensation data for analytics roles at Instacart. Use this information to understand the typical base salary, equity components, and bonus structures. Having a clear view of the compensation band will empower you to navigate offer negotiations confidently once you pass the interview stages.

You have the technical foundation and the analytical mindset required to excel. Continue refining your SQL speed, practice your product sense frameworks, and leverage the additional insights and resources available on Dataford to polish your strategy. Approach your interviews with confidence, knowing you are well-prepared to demonstrate your value to the Instacart team.