I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Instacart in Jun 2023
Interview
Call with recruiter then screening with hiring manager, 30 minutes. About 25 min structured questions from manager and 5 min chat about you. Manager was nice, but something was odd in the conversation.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Tell me of a time you used data in a non-standard way. - Right skewed distributions, is it ok to log transform. - Is it ok to use retention as an indicator of satisfaction.
Faced a deep technical challenge during the interview, asked to design a personalization algorithm for product recommendations. I walked them through feature engineering and model choices, which stressed me out initially. Luckily, I realized the structure was almost identical to a problem I had explored on prachub.com while prepping. The interview progressed through a behavioral round where they focused on my previous experiences, and I ultimately received an offer, but decided to decline after careful consideration. Overall, it was intense but rewarding.
It was pretty straightforward. HR and then technicals. The technicals were a mix of statistics and math questions. Overall, it moved pretty quickly. My interviewer was quite late with no apology and in general not very friendly. I knew someone interviewing at the same time and they had a much better experience and recieved the same questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Suppose we wanted to launch 15-minute deliveries in a specific area where we already deliver. How would you statistically test the results?