Going through Instacart's SWE process right now. Did the online assessment / coding screen last week. Sharing notes because I couldn't find much recent info before I did it.
Format: two LeetCode-style problems, 90 minutes total, done on CoderPad (not HackerRank). You can choose your language. I did Python.
Problem 1: Graph traversal. BFS variant. Felt like a medium on LeetCode. Took me about 22 minutes. Test cases were reasonable, no weird edge cases designed to trip you up.
Problem 2: This one was harder. Involved a sliding window on a sorted list with some constraints around maintaining order after mutations. I'd classify it as medium-hard. I got a working solution but it was not the cleanest. Took about 40 minutes.
I had 28 minutes left, went back and cleaned up my BFS solution a bit. No idea if they read comments but I added them anyway.
Overall difficulty: Not brutal. If you've done 50-60 mediums and a handful of hards you should be fine. I've seen people say Instacart asks hard-hards but at least in my 2026 OA that wasn't the case.
Time to hear back: 4 business days. Got a recruiter call scheduled so I assume I passed.
One thing: CoderPad has a notes section. I used it to write out my approach before coding. Don't know if that's visible to reviewers but it helped me not panic-code.
Happy to answer questions. Will update when I'm further along.