Instacart · Primly Community

Went through the Instacart iOS loop last month, here's what actually happened

mobile_mara · 4 replies

Just finished my loop for an iOS SWE role (L4 equivalent). Five rounds total over two days: Recruiter screen, 20 min, mostly timeline and comp range check Technical phone screen: live coding, Swift, data structures. They gave me a problem around parsing a nested structure and asked me to optimize it. Standard stuff. Onsite round 1: system design. They gave me "design the Instacart search and browse experience for a shopper on low connectivity." Interesting framing. They wanted me to think about caching, offline state, sync conflicts. Onsite round 2: more coding. Graph traversal problem, then a follow-up on time complexity tradeoffs. Behavioral: two interviewers, 30 min each. Questions were very STAR-structured. "Tell me about a time you disagreed with a product decision" and "describe a project where requirements kept changing mid-build."

The thing that surprised me most was how much they probed on product intuition during the behavioral rounds. Not just "here's a situation, tell me what you did" but also "and why did you think that was the right call for the user?" They seem to genuinely want engineers who have opinions about the product, not just the code.

Timeline: screen to offer was 5 weeks. They gave me 48 hours on the offer, which felt tight. Recruiter was responsive though.

4 replies

jp_newgrad

that offline state / low connectivity framing for system design is interesting. do you think they'd use a similar angle for a backend role or was that specific to mobile?

mobile_mara

my guess is backend would be more about the order routing / dispatch layer or search indexing. the offline angle was definitely mobile-specific. but the "think about edge cases in the shopper experience" thread ran through all my rounds so i'd internalize that regardless of role.

sre_sol

48 hours on the offer is pretty industry standard for tech companies now, honestly. i've seen 24 hours. at least they were responsive during the process, that's the actual signal.

market_realist

5 weeks start to finish is actually decent these days. i've had loops go 9 weeks and then get cancelled. appreciate you writing this up.