Instacart Technical Program Manager (TPM) Interview Guide
Updated by Instacart candidates
Written by Aakanksha Ahuja, Senior Technical ContributorThis guide was written with the help of TPM interviewers at Instacart.
tl;dr
At the outset, Instacart is just another online grocery app with a 30-minute delivery promise and convenience at your doorstep. But behind the scenes is a team of gastronomes and fresh produce connoisseurs, who love tech and solving hard problems, and strive to serve 95% of American households.
TPMs at Instacart work at this delicious intersection of food and technical complexity. They push the shopping cart forward by driving internal technical programs. Although TPMs operate within engineering at Instacart, they also lead initiatives, independently, based on the organization’s highest priorities and biggest product challenges. As a TPM, their work spans all sides of Instacart’s four-sided marketplace, including customers, shoppers, brands, and retail partners.
Instacart has an open culture, where initiative and ownership are highly valued. There’s no specific “culture fit” round at Instacart, yet the vibe tends towards people who are compassionate, quirky, and quick-thinking. Employees appreciate the transparency and honesty among its leaders, along with the benefit of its remote-friendly culture. That said, the TPM role at Instacart is a highly competitive position with a relatively small team—thoroughly prepare to grab a seat at the table.
🥕 Fun Fact: Instacart serves more than 14 million active users and about 1 in 4 families in the U.S. order from Instacart.
What does an Instacart TPM do?
TPMs at Instacart are responsible for leading end-to-end, internal technical programs. TPMs bring strong technical know-how, a sense of ownership, and the skill to mitigate risks and lead programs to fruition.
🥕 For less technical candidates: If technical knowledge is not your strongest suit, consider interviewing with the Project Management team at Instacart instead.
Instacart TPMs work closely with stakeholders across engineering and product on projects, such as using advanced machine learning (ML) to offer personalized replacement of out-of-stock items, creating a system for offering coupons on brands based on purchase history, and evolving the current ML tech stack and data infrastructure for scale and more.
For these programs, TPMs define project scope, and requirements, take a call on technical trade-offs, and run post-mortems. Unlike companies, like Meta or Amazon, where TPMs work in small pods with other stakeholders, Instacart TPMs operate in close contact with other TPMs.
🥕 TPMs vs Project Managers: At Instacart, the difference between program managers and project managers is based on the kind of programs you lead. While program managers lead all internal projects, project managers are responsible for external assignments related to grocery brands, external clients, retailers, and so on.
Beyond technical skills, another core expertise that TPMs at Instacart have is strategic thinking. While typically TPMs are only “expected” to excel at program execution (in other tech companies), the buck doesn’t stop there at Instacart. Ideally, TPMs excel at technical problem-solving, strategizing, and building robust processes.
Before you apply
- Browse our latest collection of TPM interview questions.
- Have a story bank ready. You should have at least 5 interesting experiences from your TPM jobs to share across different screening rounds.
- Take the complete TPM interview course to ace the Instacart TPM interview.
Interview process
The TPM interview process at Instacart is divided into 3 stages, and applicants typically have six to seven conversations in the entire process. These include:
- Stage 1: Recruiter phone screen
- Stage 2: Hiring manager phone screen
- Stage 3: Onsite interviews (4–5 rounds)
- Round 1: TPM-to-TPM screen
- Round 2: Technical screen
- Round 3: TPM competency screen
- Round 4: TPM technical competency screen
Stage 1: Recruiter phone screen
The recruiter phone screen at Instacart is similar to other tech companies. At this stage, the recruiter tries to get a pulse on your background, experience, compensation expectations, and so on. Remember to brush up on your resume—focus especially on your technical and domain knowledge from previous stints.
Sample questions:
- Tell me about yourself.
- What do you do in your current role?
- Why do you want to join Instacart?
- What are you looking for in your next role?
- What are your compensation expectations?
Stage 2: Hiring manager phone screen
This screen process typically takes 30–45 minutes, where the interviewer gauges your program and project management skills.
This stage is where your story bank comes in handy. The interviewer is looking for key takeaways, both technical and behavioral, from your previous experience that demonstrate a match with Instacart. If you get stuck, use the Situation, Task, Action, and Result (STAR) method to narrate your anecdotes.
The hiring manager rounds at Instacart are heavy-weighted from the other screens.
Sample questions:
- What are the programs you’ve run that you’re most proud of?
- What’s one thing you could have improved for a program you ran?
- Consider times when you had limited resources. How did you balance time, budget, scope, and risk at all program stages?
- If you’re given an offer from Instacart, which team would be your “dream team” that you'd want to be a part of? Why?
🥕 Good-to-have ingredient: E-commerce or retail experience is a huge plus for the TPM role at Instacart. If you know supply chain management, delivery systems, and retail partnerships, you’ll have the advantage.
Stage 3: Onsite interview
Expect 4–5 rounds for a typical onsite interview at Instacart. These interviews happen with different stakeholders and take about 45–60 minutes each.
Round 1: TPM-to-TPM screen
This is a peer-to-peer screening round. Expect a combination of behavior, program sense, and experiential questions.
The interviewers want to gauge you on the following aspects:
- Your approach to kick starting new projects
- Your prioritization framework for competing projects
- The metrics you choose to measure project success
- Your influencing style with critical stakeholders
- Your process for winding down a project
❌ Less-experienced candidates, who may not have a extensive knowledge of running programs at scale, get stuck when asked about a problem that needs to be solved for millions of users, or when prioritizing between strategic projects.
✅ Strong candidates, even though they don’t have experiencing working in “mature” companies, tap into their startup experience and use it to their advantage. How? By elaborating on how they wore multiple hats in the current company, worked cross-functionally with other departments, and acquired expertise beyond what was required for their role.
Sample questions:
- What’s your expectation of being a TPM?
- Do you anticipate you would face any conflicts as a TPM at Instacart? Tell me more about those anticipated conflicts.
- What was the last challenge you had and how did you solve it?
- Tell me about a time when you had multiple priorities from different stakeholders. How did you navigate it?
- Describe a time when you disagreed with your manager. How did you resolve the disagreement?
Round 2: Technical screen
This round is a technical screen and is conducted by an engineering manager/staff engineer. You’ll be asked a system design question that typically focuses on designing a particular feature and not an entire product.
Because it’s a grocery delivery company, prepare for system design questions asked most often in the e-commerce domain.
🥕 Practice questions like:
- Design a system for tracking shipments.
- Design a system for a product catalog.
- Design a system for communicating with a payment processor.
- Design a database model for an Instacart-like system.
- What would the system of a video store look like?
As a TPM candidate, you’re expected to walk the interviewer through your entire thought process. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write code. Rather, explain and draw the architecture, and lay out your testing and launch plan.
To succeed in this round:
- Focus on setting clear goals, objectives, and impact for the feature.
- Show that you can make trade-offs, and converse fluently in technical speak.
- Talk about edge cases, and your plan to scale the feature.
Round 3: TPM competency screen
This is your second chat with the hiring manager, so expect the conversation to be deeper than the previous one. Again, you’ll have a mix of program sense, project management, and behavioral questions.
Sample questions:
- How do you navigate conflicts?
- Talk about a time when you could have done better with a program you managed.
- Share a time when you identified an opportunity that needed a lot of convincing for people to buy into.
- What’s the best way to estimate the workload of a new project without knowing the previous history?
- How would you estimate the impact of changing timelines?
- What will you do if your first milestone is delayed?
More senior candidates tend to showcase proactive problem-solving and leadership. In addition to how they solved the challenge at work, they will share things like: how they ensured the same tech issue didn’t crop up the next time, the process they built for this, and a documented risk mitigation plan for similar issues in the future. A senior candidate will shine in this round by explicitly talking about the experiences where they changed a part of the playbook in previous roles.
More junior candidates tend to jump straight into answering the question. For instance, while responding to the question on challenges faced in the day-to-day, a TPM might explain the technical issue, and how they solved it.
Round 4: Technical TPM competency screen
This round is (again) a technical competency screen. As a TPM, you’re expected to demonstrate a combination of program sense, product sense, and end-to-end architecture knowledge for a tech product.
Sample questions:
- Tell us about a time when you faced a technical issue on a program.
- Tell me more about the technical architecture of “X” program.
- How did you solve “X” issue with the engineer from a technical standpoint?
- Do you have suggestions for redesigning Instacart’s payment system?
- Describe what metrics would be tracked in a dashboard for Instacart.
If the interviewers don’t get enough signals on your candidature, there’ll be a final round; i.e. round 5.
Additional resources
- Get mentorship and coaching from an Instacart mentor.
- To maximize your odds, take this system design course.
- Explore these TPM mock interviews at FAANG companies.
FAQs
How should I prepare for an Instacart TPM interview?
- Prepare 5 compelling stories from your TPM experience.
- Brush up on system design and behavioral questions.
- Refine your responses based on impact, risk, trade-offs, and ownership.
- Dive deep into Life at Instacart.
- Set up mock interviews with other TPMs.
How long does the Technical Program Manager interview process take?
On average, the interview process can take anywhere between 4–6 weeks.
Learn everything you need to ace your Technical Program Manager interviews.
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