I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Instacart (San Francisco, CA) in Apr 2016
Interview
They send you a coding challenge which is easy enough. You just have to create a predictive model from a couple csv files they send you. Then they bring you onsite for a whiteboarding interview with some members of their current team. It was alright, the problems seemed straightforward. I ended up not getting an offer because they said my approach wasn't specific enough. Oh well. The team seemed smart and friendly. I went into this with 2 years experience when they were looking for 4, so perhaps I'm just not experienced enough yet.
Faced a deep technical challenge during the interview, asked to design a personalization algorithm for product recommendations. I walked them through feature engineering and model choices, which stressed me out initially. Luckily, I realized the structure was almost identical to a problem I had explored on prachub.com while prepping. The interview progressed through a behavioral round where they focused on my previous experiences, and I ultimately received an offer, but decided to decline after careful consideration. Overall, it was intense but rewarding.
It was pretty straightforward. HR and then technicals. The technicals were a mix of statistics and math questions. Overall, it moved pretty quickly. My interviewer was quite late with no apology and in general not very friendly. I knew someone interviewing at the same time and they had a much better experience and recieved the same questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Suppose we wanted to launch 15-minute deliveries in a specific area where we already deliver. How would you statistically test the results?