I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart in Jan 2018
Interview
Reached out to be a 'busy' recruiter who took a week to even get a follow up? Two hacker ranks and then a project, and got zero feedback even when I pushed for it. Imagine giving up 2-3 days of your time, money to get a meal to feel well enough to do these things and they can't even type literally 2 sentences of feedback.
Sounds like a great place to work, huh? In fact past the recruiter not a single engineer spoke to me in the entire process.
I should have listened to glassdoor and NOT taken the interview. Don't do it. Waste of your time from a company that clearly doesn't value it's employees!
Faced a deep technical challenge during the interview, asked to design a personalization algorithm for product recommendations. I walked them through feature engineering and model choices, which stressed me out initially. Luckily, I realized the structure was almost identical to a problem I had explored on prachub.com while prepping. The interview progressed through a behavioral round where they focused on my previous experiences, and I ultimately received an offer, but decided to decline after careful consideration. Overall, it was intense but rewarding.
It was pretty straightforward. HR and then technicals. The technicals were a mix of statistics and math questions. Overall, it moved pretty quickly. My interviewer was quite late with no apology and in general not very friendly. I knew someone interviewing at the same time and they had a much better experience and recieved the same questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Suppose we wanted to launch 15-minute deliveries in a specific area where we already deliver. How would you statistically test the results?