Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 4 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Instacart nel mese di ott 2024
Colloquio
HM call, recruiter call, then four-round onsites with some standard stuff (ML, behavioural, and coding) split over a week. I would describe it as moderate difficulty (as someone else has already said). Unlike some other companies they do not ask LC hards. I cannot give more specifics as I signed an NDA. Spent around a month and a half in the process overall.
The outcome was a rejection. Recruiter and HM made it clear that the interview performance was strong and the main reason for the rejection was the amount of competition; other candidates just had better experience. I feel like if experience was going to be the sticking point in the end they should have just resume-rejected me as it would have saved time for all parties involved.
That being said, they were very nice people and the process and interview expectations were cleanly laid out. This was my first MLE interview post-grad-school so it was a great learning experience. My advice for anyone interviewing is to carefully read over the materials provided by the recruiter.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Instacart (New York, NY) nel mese di giu 2026
Colloquio
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.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 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.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un selezionatore. La procedura ha richiesto 3 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Instacart (Toronto, ON) nel mese di set 2025
Colloquio
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