Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 2 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Instacart (San Francisco, CA) nel mese di ago 2018
Colloquio
Applied through their website and got an initial call with recruiter followed by a 1-hour phone screen. The phone screen is basically a one-hour Hackerrack challenge. My interviewer doesn't really want to talk to me nor listen to my approach to this problem. He just sat there and work on his own things to wait for me to finish the challenge. After I finished the coding challenge, he ran a few tests cases to make sure it worked and ended the interview. Without asking me if I have any questions to him or this company overall. The day after I was contacted to have an onsite, which is another three-hour Hackerrank challenge and 4 30 mins casual talks with different people in the team. I went to onsite and was sitting in a room doing my challenge. There was absolutely no one came to me during that 3 hours to check if everything was well. After finishing the challenge, one engineer came and asked me to run my solution and want to see the output. After I gave them the correct output, he said "good" without bothering to hear what my approach is. After me alone investing 1 + 3 hours of my time coding, I can finally chat with some real human. The entire interview process ended after me investing 6 hours + plus commute and they invested only two hours for the casual chat.
It was the dumbest idea ever for me to have an interview with this company. They do not really care about their candidates at all. All they care is to spend the least amount of time and hope to hire some good people. (Good job whoever designed this process and good luck with your goal)
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
KV store with timestamp
Password cracker game from a stream API
I'm sure it's easier to grade applicants with AI, but it'd be nice to have humans involved in the interview process, too. You'll face a couple of AI powered coding challenges. The bigger problems are the ethical implications here after looking into how the company works, with variable pricing based on data on how badly they can screw the consumer with upcharges and how to keep money in their pockets rather than the shoppers & drivers
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
If you could replace your family with AI, would you do it?
Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Instacart (San Francisco, CA) nel mese di feb 2026
Colloquio
First there is a codesignal test. This is for 90 minutes and felt frantic. Way too many features/code paths to implement.
Then there is the karat llm interview which is 50 minutes.
Then a full day of regular interview loop.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
For CodeSignal it was implementing a cache key store with timestamps. Started with basic setting and getting, then evolved into more advanced code. 4 different parts. Writing a lot of code for this.
For the LLM interview you work with a company called Karat. You are giving an VS code like workspace and an ai to help. You have 50 minutes. They then dump a large project in your space. For me it was a bus route simulator.
I was then asked to implement a feature : Have the system prioritize Priority Pass people. I used the LLM to track down the code and implement it, but it was difficult to test in code that is unknown to me. The next feature was implementing wheelchairs for the bus which requires special capacity checks.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 4 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Instacart (Toronto, ON) nel mese di feb 2025
Colloquio
1. Online OA with codesignal to start with. Very standard and not hard
2. Got the 4 interview rounds and you can always divide into 2 parts of 2 interviews each. It was be 2 codesignals with medium difficulty and I managed to do both. One system design which was average for me and interviewer was okay as well. Behavioural round was standard. No wonder why I didn't manage to get the offer.