Demonstrate ownership and resilience
Overview
This question evaluates ownership, resilience, prioritization, communication, conflict resolution, risk management, and the ability to learn from failure in a software engineering context.
Instacart
Sep 6, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
Behavioral & Leadership
0
0
Behavioral & Leadership Prompts (Software Engineer Onsite)
Context: You are interviewing onsite for a Software Engineer role. Answer the following prompts using the STAR framework (Situation, Task, Action, Result). Focus on impact, trade-offs, prioritization, communication, and learning.
- Tooling or platform limitation
- Describe a time you faced a tooling/platform limitation and still delivered results.
- What trade-offs did you make and how did you mitigate risk?
- End-to-end ownership under tight deadlines
- Tell me about a project you owned end-to-end with a tight deadline.
- How did you prioritize and communicate?
- Conflict with a teammate or stakeholder
- Give an example of a conflict and how you resolved it.
- Failure and learning
- Describe a failure, what you learned, and how you changed your approach afterward.
Guidance: Keep each response 60–90 seconds, quantify outcomes, and make your actions explicit.
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