Instacart Interview Questions
Practice 93 real Instacart interview questions for 2026. Covers all top categories — Coding & Algorithms, Analytics & Experimentation, Behavioral & Leadership, System Design, and Data Manipulation (SQL/Python) — across Software Engineer, Data Scientist, and Machine Learning Engineer roles. Instacart interview questions in this set come from actual interviews and include detailed solutions, making it a focused resource for interview preparation. What’s distinctive: interviews favor practical, production-minded problems tied to marketplace and fulfillment constraints. Software Engineers see a coding-heavy loop (bus‑boarding simulation metrics, expression evaluation, encoded-string decoding, parser/evaluator tasks, payroll and inventory trackers) plus system-design scenarios about inventory and scaling; Data Scientists get marketplace-metric forensics (D14 retention drops, weekly revenue attribution, Miami Ultrafast effects), experiment design with network effects, and SQL ranking/aggregation; ML Engineers face Core ML reasoning and tight algorithmic tasks. Evaluators look for correctness, trade‑off thinking, metric-driven debugging, and cross‑functional communication. To prepare, practice the specific coding patterns above, sharpen SQL/experiment design, and craft STAR stories that show impact and ownership.
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Optimize file reading and expression DFS
Optimize file reading and expression DFS Given a large password file, build a program to read the required password(s) while minimizing memory usage. ...
Compute immediate delivery percentage
Compute immediate delivery percentage LeetCode 1173. Immediate Food Delivery I – Write an SQL query to calculate the percentage of immediate (same-day...
Design a versioned key-value store
Design a versioned key-value store Design and implement a versioned key-value store that supports set(key, value, timestamp) and get(key, timestamp) t...
Evaluate arithmetic expression with precedence
Question Implement an evaluator for a string arithmetic expression. The input contains non-negative integers, the operators +, -, `, /, parentheses ( ...
Evaluate arithmetic expression using DFS
Given a string representing an arithmetic expression with non-negative integers, +, -, *, /, parentheses, and optional spaces, evaluate its value. Use...
Optimize file reads for password validation
Given a multi-gigabyte credentials file on disk with one record per line in the format user_id,salt,password_hash (hex), implement validate(user_id, p...
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...
Implement a pivot table transformation
Given a dataset of transactions with columns: user_id (string), category (string), subcategory (string), amount (float), ts (ISO timestamp), implement...
Calculate Weekly Revenue and Order Count for Standard Deliveries
instacart_orders +----------+---------+---------+------------+---------+--------------+ | order_id | user_id | revenue | created_at | geo | delive...
Build a Progressive Banking System
Build a Progressive Banking System The source reports progressive account, activity-ranking, expiring-transfer, and merge features but not exact retur...
Evaluate an arithmetic expression
Write a function that evaluates a mathematical expression given as a string. Requirements: - Supports non-negative integers and whitespace. - Supports...
Solve Two Sorted-Array Tasks
This question evaluates competency in array manipulation, handling of sorted data, search techniques and algorithmic complexity analysis, focusing on ...
Decode a password string into letters
This question evaluates string parsing and encoding/decoding skills, specifically mapping numeric tokens and handling delimiter characters within the ...
Implement multiple coding round problems
This multi-part question evaluates algorithmic problem-solving skills including efficient lookup/search, stable ordering and priority management, stre...
Implement timestamped task management system APIs
You are implementing an in-memory Task Management System. All API methods are called with a timestamp representing the logical time when the operation...
Investigate marketplace metrics and experiment rollout
You are interviewing for a Senior Data Scientist role at a two-sided marketplace like Instacart, where customers place delivery orders and shoppers ch...
Write SQL to rank advertisers and profitability
You are given two denormalized tables. Use ANSI SQL (CTEs allowed) and UNPIVOT (or an equivalent UNION ALL approach if UNPIVOT is unavailable). Table:...
Aggregate weekly revenue and attribute 4% drop
Write SQL over the following schema to: (A) compute weekly revenue by ISO week (Monday–Sunday) from orders, excluding cancelled/refunded; revenue_usd ...
Summarize your background concisely
Behavioral Prompt: 60–90 Second Career Walkthrough (Data Scientist, HR Screen) Context You are interviewing for a Data Scientist role in a consumer-te...
Define what you seek next, with trade-offs
Behavioral & Leadership — Role Fit, Trade‑offs, and 90‑Day Fit Check (Data Scientist) Task Articulate what you need to thrive in your next Data Scient...