wrapped up the Instacart frontend engineer interview loop a few weeks ago. went in expecting a fairly standard frontend screen but there were some surprises. sharing notes for anyone about to go through it.
the setup: recruiter call, technical phone screen, then a 4-round virtual onsite.
technical phone screen: one coding question, javascript, done in coderpad. they gave me a problem involving DOM manipulation and event handling. not react-specific. i remember thinking "oh they want to see if I actually understand the platform, not just the framework." i'd say medium difficulty, focused on correctness and explaining trade-offs.
virtual onsite:
coding round 1: more javascript. array/string manipulation, medium difficulty. the interviewer was hands-on and asked me to refactor my solution partway through once it worked. they wanted to see how i think about readability and performance, not just green tests.
coding round 2: this one was more frontend-specific. they gave a design requirement and asked me to implement a small UI component in react. they cared about: accessibility (aria attributes, keyboard nav), error states, and edge cases. not about pixel-perfect styling.
system design (frontend): this was scoped to frontend architecture, not backend distributed systems. they asked something like: design the Instacart search experience at a high level. think about: state management, API design from the client's perspective, how you'd handle loading states and partial failures, how you'd approach performance for a product catalog with thousands of items. this round was the most interesting.
behavioral: 4-5 STAR questions. the one that tripped me up was about a time i disagreed with a technical direction and how i handled it. have something specific, not vague.
overall impressions: they seemed to genuinely care about craft. my interviewer in the component round asked me follow-up questions about my opinions on CSS-in-JS vs utility classes. it felt like a real conversation about how i think about frontend, not a checklist.
bay area role, mid-senior level target. offer would have been in the L4/L5 band based on what the recruiter said earlier. didn't make it past debrief (no specific feedback given, which is frustrating) but the process felt fair.