Instacart · Senior SWE, L5/L6 (9 years) · Rejected

Rounds

1. Online Assessment: 90 min, 5 parts
2. Onsite: 2 coding rounds (60 min blocks, so about 45-50 min for coding, and the problems come in stages)
3. System Design: 60 min
4. Behavioral: 45 min

Questions asked

Online Assessment

• 2 sets of talking to an AI product manager to get requirements, then implementing them using AI.
• 1 bug fix question.

Coding: Calculate a cart

• Part 1: Take a string with product info, quantity, price etc. and total up the cart price and quantities to match their output.
• Part 2: Same thing, but add a set of discount coupons, find the optimal coupon and output the best price.
• Part 3: I didn’t get here but heard these are stretch goals.

UI: Create a Product list and Cart
You are given a UI app using a framework of your choice with 2 endpoints, one to get products and the other to add items to cart.

• Part 1: Create a search input and display the product list including pagination (the endpoint supports all of these pieces already).
• Part 2: Add an “add to cart” button for each product and show the cart, as well as clear and remove controls.
• Part 3: Add category filtering (I didn’t get here but it was easy to explain how I’d do it with my existing setup).

System Design

• Design Instacart’s search bar (autocomplete/suggestions) and search page, with more emphasis on the search bar interactions.

Behavioral

• Talk about a project you were most excited or proud of.
• A project or problem that was technically challenging.
• Feedback that has stuck with you.

Tips

• OA: the annoying thing is that the AI PM questions are separate, so going back and forth between your convo with the AI and the implementation area is annoying. They do give you a notes area.
• The bug fix should be a time saver, you can see the bug in the UI and just have to trace it down. The fix is very trivial.
• For OA scoring I got a little above 75%, not sure what the cutoff is.
• On the cart problem I spent way too long sorting out the equation for how many free items in a Buy X Get Y free format. Work that formula out quickly.
• Got denied via email and they said they can’t provide any feedback, which was disappointing given the time commitment.
• For the search bar design, Autocomplete Search List on FrontendLead is good prep for the interaction side.