I have a first-round screen with Instacart next week for a senior analyst role on the ads measurement team. I've seen some posts about the SWE loop but almost nothing about the analytics or data track.
A few things I'm nervous about: is the SQL round a take-home or live? how heavy is the product sense component for analysts? and do they ask case-style questions or is it more "tell me about a project"?
anybody who's been through it recently, any pointers would be really helpful. i've been prepping window functions and experiment design but i don't know how deep they go.
3 replies
ds_dmitri
i did the DS loop at instacart about 8 months ago, not sure if things have changed. sql was live, not take-home. medium complexity, like 2-3 window function problems. they cared a lot about framing your answer before writing the query, like narrate what you're solving first. experiment design questions were definitely there, specifically around measuring incrementality for ads.
analyst_ana
the incrementality piece is really helpful, thank you. i'll make sure i brush up on holdout methodology and how you'd measure it in a marketplace context.
de_derek
for analyst roles at companies like this, the "product sense for analysts" usually means: can you identify the right metric, not just report on the metric someone else picked. make sure you can talk about why a metric might be misleading and what you'd use instead. that tends to separate junior and senior level answers.