I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart (San Francisco, CA)
Interview
For the interview process, which varies quite a bit as I understand, there were five or six rounds of interviews, including the recruiter, the hiring manager, some future peers, a couple of the direct reports and then the hiring manager again.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you handle working on a team with folks of different levels of experience and backgrounds?
Interview process was straight forward but there are several rounds so be ready for a long haul. The questions are focused a lot on figuring out how you'd react in certain scenarios, but a lot of people are really trying to see if you'll be a good fit culturally too
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What do you think are the biggest challenge Instacart faces?
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Instacart in May 2025
Interview
Was recommended for a role from a current employee, but it took a month to hear anything back.
Recruiter screener seemed to go really well. It was scheduled for 30 minutes and it lasted an hour. The recruiter told me I was going to move to the next round before the call ended.
Second interview with the hiring manager was the same week and scheduled for 30 minutes. They showed up about two minutes late to let me into the Google meets room and just kind of jumped into it. Seemed to be reading questions directly from the screen, gave me positive feedback about my answers but didn’t ask me to clarify or go into more detail. Didn’t ask for specific examples of past projects or work, but asked rather broad hypotheticals based on strategy and management. Skipped some questions because “you basically already answered this one”, and left about 7 minutes for me to ask questions.
It was pretty rough and I couldn’t really get them to laugh or crack a smile. I figured I’d hear about the rejection after and I got it the next day.
Had I moved on to the next round I was told there would be a total of 4-6 interviews. Next would have been interviews with the “pillars”, which neither the recruiter nor the hiring manager seemed to be able to explain who they were.
I wouldn’t say the interview was difficult, but I don’t think my interviewer was a natural at it.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you prioritize your objectives and how do you handle unexpected changes to your workload?