Instacart Data Engineer interview questions

Recruiter reached out to me via linkedin and got an interview invitation. First run technical screen is to write a SQL. Not hard. The second run of data modeling challenge is totally wasting my time. It consisted of two tasks: data modeling and programming. I spent half of day to complete and then got rejected. The hire manager get back to me saying I did not consider the flexibility that enables the flexible data exploration. But he did explain how is the flexibility he really want. There's not even clarification in the document that they want the model to be flexibility and how flexibility they want. They just let you make assumption in data modeling and then reject your if your assumption is not pleasing them. Don't waste your time for this company.

I had a conversation with a hiring manager then received a data engineering challenge. The challenge consisted of two tasks: data modeling and programming. For data modeling I provided a designed schema in pdf files (facts, dimensions, relationships), description of designed tables and columns, ddls and sqls for metric calculations. For programming task I provided Python script, input and output files and two wrappers to run the Python script in Linux and Windows. After couple of days I received an email with the rejection if a form of standard explanation to proceed with other candidates. It's more than a year had passed since then and recently I found out that they put a permanent hiring ban on me. It's really weird that a company puts such permanent ban for just the engineering challenge.