Instacart Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Coding Rounds, System Design on Inventory, Waiting on Results

Instacart·Software Engineer·Oct 2026
OnsiteIn progressmedium

While preparing I kept grinding system design, and it turned out my coding wasn't as fast as I thought it would be.

One round was "Calculate Equation Expression": you're given a set of variable assignments and have to compute the value of a specified variable. Part one: the right-hand side is either a number or another variable, so you just recurse down.

Part two adds addition and subtraction, and the variables can reference each other. Part three is error handling: besides cycles, there are variables that are never defined and the same variable being assigned conflicting values, and if the result can't be determined you return an empty string. The earlier parts went fairly smoothly, but at this point I had to go back and change a few things.

The other coding round was a shopping cart: the input is item records, and you compute the total item count and price, then add percentage discounts and buy-N-get-M deals, and for the same item you pick the cheapest deal. After that there was sorting by aisle, with frozen items last. Reading the problem and handling the input took quite a bit of time.

The system design round was an inventory system, and we talked about stock reservation, concurrency, and overselling. The behavioral round centered on projects I had done before: technical tradeoffs, and how I handle it when I disagree with someone.

Now I'm waiting for the result. I was relieved after finishing the coding, but looking back, the project round is the one I feel less sure about, since some of my answers felt too generic.

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Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Instacart
Role
Software Engineer
Rounds
Onsite
Outcome
In progress
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Oct 2026
Questions from this interview
4 questions

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