The scarce resource is no longer the ability to write code. It's the judgment to know what's safe to ship. We built the interview to test exactly that.
The Shift
The role of the developer is evolving. The next generation will pair strong software fundamentals with the ability to work across this spectrum.
AI assists with code generation, debugging, refactoring. The developer is still the producer.
The developer breaks work into tasks, runs multiple agents in parallel, and synthesizes the output.
Agents pick up tickets, plan, implement, test, and open PRs. The developer reviews, challenges, and makes the call to ship.
The Interview
The candidate is dropped into a fully functional environment: a real codebase, an agentic IDE with access to the latest AI models, terminal access, file navigation.
The candidate uses the AI assistant to understand the codebase, explore the problem, and produce a plan. The interviewer probes their reasoning, challenges their approach, asks about alternatives and tradeoffs.
It doesn't matter if the plan is perfect. What matters is whether the candidate is intentional about their decisions and can articulate their reasoning as it happens.
The candidate builds using the AI assistant. Implementation tends to be fairly quick. Whether they one-shot it or break it down incrementally, there's good conversation here about how they structure the change.
Review is continuous and transcends both Plan and Implement. The candidate reviews the plan before building, reviews generated code during implementation, and sometimes a broader review of the overall approach happens toward the end.
What Candidates Say
The interview is a reflection of how they actually work — and many are genuinely surprised by that.
Consistent feedback across candidates
Why HackerRank
We work closely with some of the leading organizations going through this shift right now. That proximity gives us a front-row seat to what's actually working.
When something needs fixing, we fix it. When the market shifts, we evolve the experience with it.
We help create content tailored to the company's stack and the roles they're hiring for.
We work closely with engineering teams to help them train interviewers and conduct the new style of round effectively.
The Platform
AI-enabled environments by default, agentic capabilities, keeping pace with how engineers actually work.
Redesigning problem libraries so they require judgment that AI alone cannot provide.
New signals for the AI era — measuring what actually predicts performance on the job.
If transforming your company to be AI-first is on your charter, hiring is one of the most consequential places that transformation shows up.
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