Instacart Software Engineer Interview Questions
Master your tech interview with our curated database of real questions from top companies.
Implement matrix-indexing and expression resolver
Question Given a text file path whose contents include a single block starting with a line like "[2,4]" followed by rows of equal-length characters (e...
Parse password from indexed matrix file
Question Given a filepath to a text file containing one index line [x, y] followed by a matrix of characters (origin at lower-left (0, 0)), return the...
Evaluate dependent variable expressions
Question Given a target variable name and a list of assignment strings of the form 'Ti = expression' where the expression is either a number, a single...
Implement bus route simulation features
Bus Route Simulation – Boarding, Capacity, and Priority Passes You are given a partially implemented codebase for simulating bus routes in a city. Bus...
Pivot transactions by date without date libs
Given a stream of transaction rows (shopper_id, date_str, amount) where date_str is ISO format 'YYYY-MM-DD', produce a pivoted report for a specified ...
Compute delivery wait times
You're building a last‑mile delivery simulator. Given n orders, each with arrival_time (non-decreasing integers) and service_time (positive integers),...
Answer standard behavioral questions
Behavioral Interview Prompts — Software Engineer (Onsite) Context: You are preparing for an onsite Behavioral & Leadership interview for a Software En...
Design scalable inventory system and avoid races
System Design: Scalable, Highly Available Inventory Management Context Design an inventory management system for a high-traffic e-commerce platform th...
Solve expression evaluator and string decoder
1) Implement an arithmetic expression evaluator that reads expressions from a text file (one expression per line) and outputs the evaluated result for...
Implement prefix and suffix file search
Implement data structures and APIs to store file names and support efficient queries that match both a given prefix and suffix. Provide methods add(na...
Design cloud storage with quotas and compression
System Design: Multi‑Tenant Cloud Storage Service (Take‑Home) You are tasked with designing a multi‑tenant cloud storage service that supports file up...
Demonstrate ownership and resilience
Behavioral & Leadership Prompts (Software Engineer Onsite) Context: You are interviewing onsite for a Software Engineer role. Answer the following pro...
Design an e-commerce catalog
System Design: Product Catalog Service You are designing a product catalog service for an e‑commerce site. Assume a read‑heavy workload, a relational ...
Pivot order-status counts
Question Given an orders table (order_id, shopper_id, order_date, status, …), pivot the data so that each row is one shopper and each column shows the...
Design product catalog service
System Design: Product Catalog Service for an E-commerce Platform Context You are designing the product catalog service for a large consumer e-commerc...
Optimize file reading and expression DFS
Question Given a large password file, build a program to read the required password(s) while minimizing memory usage. How would you optimize the space...
Design an inventory system
System Design: Inventory Management with Real-Time Stock and Ordering Context You are designing an inventory management service for a retail/marketpla...
Solve bank, password, expression algorithm tasks
Question Implement a banking system that supports four specified operations within 90 minutes. Implement a password-related algorithm (e.g., validatin...
Compute immediate delivery percentage
Question LeetCode 1173. Immediate Food Delivery I – Write an SQL query to calculate the percentage of immediate (same-day) orders, rounded to two deci...
Troubleshoot a production incident end-to-end
Incident Troubleshooting: Intermittent Failures and Elevated Latency in Transfers Context A microservices-based banking platform begins experiencing i...