I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart (New York, NY) in May 2022
Interview
Contact with recruiter, I skipped the technical screen and did the first round: one hour of Coding and one hour of Machine Learning Concepts. I would describe it as a honest but hard interview. Anything you claim you've done on your resume, you must be able to speak to in great details. Very nice interviewers. They were both really smart too.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding: Two Leetcode questions first was easy-ish but need optimal solution and second was easy maybe medium and needed optimal solution. Definitely discussing time and space complexity.
ML Concepts: Just someone incredibly knowledgeable and thorough asking very details technical questions about all the models on your resume, about choices made, subtle differences between models. Explain gradient boosting etc.. difference between XGBoost and LightGBM.
I applied online. I interviewed at Instacart (New York, NY) in Jun 2026
Interview
Started with HM interview, then Recruiter, then VO. HM was nice, and didn't ask many questions, just some background. Recruiter was incredibly unprofessional and didn't even show up to the scheduled meeting. Showed no respect for my time at all. I should have known it was a bad sign. As expected, they ghosted me after the VO.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Come up with a metric for this problem? Why is it a good metric compared to other metrics like Recall or Classification error?
Also had a coding round. Coding round was quite tough. I wasn't well prepared.
The phone screen was surprisingly short, only about 20 minutes, focusing on my background and some general ML concepts. Then came the technical round where I had to design a ranking model for Instacart’s search results. Midway through, it hit me that I had just practiced a very similar problem on PracHub, which made me feel a bit more confident. However, the depth of the discussion, especially around metrics and cold-start items, was intense. In the end, I didn’t receive an offer, but it was a decent experience overall.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart (Toronto, ON) in Sep 2025
Interview
1 round of HR screen, 4 rounds of technical
Technical:
- ML alg knowledge
- Live code - Leetcode style
- Case study: they give you a case
- Retro study: walk them through a past project
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