Great place to work if you like making an impact
Pros
I've worked in small startups, large startups, and large corporations and have yet to find a job I love as much as at Instacart. The service we run and are in the process of creating and defining is amazing and I've never felt that way about anything I've worked on in the past. People genuinely care about our customers and shoppers. Order from Instacart before you apply. It's awesome. It is a unique problem that isn't being approached in the same way elsewhere in the tech world or historically. We have a great core of smart founders, executives, engineers, analysts, support, legal, and ops team members. Is everyone great? No, but welcome to the work world; if you don't focus too much on those people and do your job well then they don't really matter. I can say with certainty that I have never seen as solid of a mix of people as the I did the day that I stepped into the office and started working at Instacart. Things aren't perfect and there are a lot of challenges. That's why I came here. To be a part of building something and being able to make an impact on it. I've never seen a good idea fall on deaf ears if someone has taken the initiative to explore or execute it and make the right case to do so. Sure, not everything works all the time, but that is because we are growing and moving at an incredibly fast speed. I've worked at companies that have tools in development for 15-years and they fail too. Guess what, it takes even longer for those problems to be fixed when they arise. Sure, there is not an engineer available to solve all of my problems throughout the day, but that's simply not how a successful organization works. I worked on an operations team at an established company and never had the opportunity to speak to an engineer. It's great that I can provide feedback and see ideas, or forms of them implemented, but they have to go through the proper channels. If you want to dictate how an engineer spends their time then get a job being a Product Manager. Does my job change on a daily basis? Yes, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. But change is good and that's why I work here. Otherwise I'd be bored. If something at Instacart is boring and repetitive I try to find a better way. Is there a clear, shortcut path for my career development? No, but I wouldn't expect that at a fast-growing, 3-year old company. You have to pave your own path. Sometimes that doesn't happen at the expected or desired pace, but it will if you do a good job. If you accept a job anywhere thinking that you are going to get promoted in six months, then you are accepting the wrong job in the first place.
Cons
As the organization grows there are challenges with team sizes, changes in work ownership, technical bugs. Fortunately, these are speed bumps and not walls. You need to be OK with change and uncertainty to work here. We may have a nice office but we are still very much a startup.
