Instacart Software Engineer Interview Experience — Waiting on Team Match After the Exact Same Loop as Last Year

Instacart·Software Engineer·Sep 2025
OnsiteIn progressmedium

My virtual onsite (VO) was two weeks ago, and I got the result last week — I'm through, and now I'm waiting on team match.

Coding round 1: two questions, both about shopper deliveries. The first one referenced something specific that doesn't translate cleanly from how I originally wrote it, so I can't say more about it here. The second one was a bit more involved, but if you'd already seen the first, you should be fine on it too.

Coding round 2: a data pivot problem. Not too hard overall, but if you're doing it in Java, watch out — their platform is genuinely bad, you can't manually import date-related packages. That cost me a ton of debugging time and I almost didn't finish. I eventually found that just comparing the strings directly (lexicographically) was enough to pass; otherwise writing a manual date-comparison routine by hand would have been a real pain.

System design: design a catalog. There's a lot of geo stuff to reference. Designing a table with a self-join was enough — the focus was mainly on the API and the DB schema.

BQ: standard behavioral questions.

Does this company ever change their questions? I interviewed here around this same time last year and got rejected. This year it was the exact same set of questions, start to finish. I was honestly shocked.

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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
Sep 2025
Questions from this interview
3 questions

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