What Is a Karat Interview? What the Name Means

A Karat interview is a live technical screen run by Karat, a company that employers hire to conduct first-round engineering interviews on their behalf. When a recruiter says your next step is a Karat interview, it means a contracted Interview Engineer, not an employee of the company you applied to, will run a recorded video call of roughly an hour with a shared coding editor, and Karat will send the employer a recording, a score, and a hiring recommendation. As of September 9, 2026, Karat reports "600,000+ technical interviews conducted" and describes itself as "Technical Interview Services for the Human + AI Era" on its homepage.

Why the interviewer does not work at the company

Karat's model is outsourcing. The company you applied to buys interview capacity from Karat instead of pulling its own engineers off their work for phone screens. Karat's product page describes "Live, human-led interviews conducted by experienced, certified interview engineers" and "500+ trained and vetted interview engineers around the world," with "24/7, on-demand interviewing available same-day, evenings, and weekends."

The Customer FAQ sets the bar for those interviewers: "To join the Karat IVE community, an engineer must have a minimum of 3 years of experience and a degree in computer science or engineering, as well as fluent English language skills." Karat calls them IVEs. They are working software engineers who interview on the side, and they follow Karat's scripted questions and rubrics rather than the employer's.

That is why the interviewer will not answer questions about the team, the role, or the company's culture. Those belong to the later rounds with the employer.

What the hour contains

Karat's candidate page gives the standard shape: "Your interview will be an hour long, and will have three major sections: A brief introduction, 10 min. of discussion questions, 40 min. of programming questions." The support FAQ puts the range at 45 to 60 minutes and says "At least half of your interview will be spent coding using our interactive coding environment, Karat Studio."

The discussion questions are short technical prompts, not behavioral stories. The programming questions are solved live in Karat Studio while the Interview Engineer watches and asks follow-ups. Karat's guide to technical interviews says interviewers "ask probing questions to determine what the candidate is doing," and the candidate page states the priority plainly: "The most important thing we are evaluating is how successfully your code solves the problem."

The minute-by-minute flow, including how the split changes by seniority, is in what to expect in a Karat interview.

What Karat sends back

The employer does not get a verbal impression. Per the Customer FAQ, Karat delivers "(a) a video recording; (b) a code playback recording; and (c) interview report including an overall recommendation and a quantitative score plus written feedback." The recording is the whole call. The exact list of what is captured and who can see it is in what a Karat interview records, scores, and keeps.

Two consequences follow. First, the person deciding whether you advance may never speak to you; they read a report and possibly watch the video. Second, the report is structured against a rubric, so the same question is scored the same way across candidates. Karat markets that consistency as the product.

Is it a test or an interview?

Both, in practice. Searches for "karat testing" reflect a real ambiguity: it feels like a test because you are scored on code that runs, and like an interview because a person is talking with you the whole time. There is no automated proctoring layer. Integrity is the Interview Engineer watching, plus a second-engineer review if the first raises a concern. That makes a Karat interview closer to a live pair-programming screen than to a HackerRank-style timed assessment.

Karat Interview and Karat NextGen

Since December 2025 Karat also sells NextGen, which its launch announcement calls "the first human-led, AI-enabled talent evaluation solution." Candidates work on "complex, multi-file projects with an integrated AI assistant while collaborating live with Karat's expert Interview Engineers." It is still a person interviewing you. Whether you were sent the classic format or NextGen changes what tools you may use, which is covered in whether Karat uses an AI interviewer.

One more thing the name carries: a redo

Karat's guide states that "Every candidate [has] the option to redo their technical interview if they're not happy with how they did in the initial interview." The window is 24 hours after the call. The mechanics and the tradeoffs are in the Karat redo policy.

What this means for candidates

Treat a Karat invitation as a scored, recorded, third-party screen with a fixed structure. Prepare for the format: a short technical discussion, then most of the hour writing working code in a browser editor while explaining your reasoning aloud. Ask the recruiter which Karat module you were assigned, because that decides whether documentation, outside resources, or an AI assistant are permitted. And book the slot when you are sharpest; Karat says "60% of interviews are scheduled outside of core business hours," so the calendar is flexible.