Karat interview: what is recorded, scored and kept

A Karat interview is a first-round technical screen that the hiring company has outsourced. The engineer on the call is an Interview Engineer, a contractor in Karat's vetted pool with at least three years of experience, not an employee of the company you applied to. They follow a scripted rubric, cannot answer questions about the team or the role, and hand back a recommendation that a second reviewer validates. Scheduling is unusually flexible because the pool is distributed; Karat says most of its interviews happen outside core business hours.

The standard session is an hour: a brief introduction, about ten minutes of discussion questions, and roughly forty minutes of programming. The discussion questions are scored, and they are the part candidates most often underprepare. Everything runs in the browser; there is no local environment to set up. Documentation lookup is allowed by default, provided you say so; generating an approach or a solution with a model is not, unless the employer bought a module that permits it. Karat's NextGen Interviews, launched in December 2025, pair a built-in AI assistant with a human interviewer, so the same vendor can run a closed-book screen for one company and an AI-native project interview for another in the same week. Ask the recruiter which module you are scheduled for, in writing.

What gets recorded is the whole thing. Karat's candidate FAQ states that the entire video call, including video and audio, your code, and a full playback is recorded and shared with the hiring company. A full playback means reviewers can watch the solution being built, not just its final state. Karat deletes candidate data on request or after a maximum of five years; the scored recommendation the employer holds has no such ceiling.

Integrity here is a person watching, not a telemetry feed. Interview Engineers are trained to report behaviors such as typing outside the browser without explanation, glancing repeatedly between monitors, or writing code in an unusual top-down order. Each of those is ambiguous on its own, which is why narration matters: say what you are about to do before you look away or sketch a structure.

Karat also offers something most screens do not: a redo. Request it within 24 hours of the original interview and you get a second attempt, but the employer sees both results and decides. Rescheduling is separate and limited to two moves.

The posts below answer the specific questions: what a Karat interview is and what the name means, what to expect minute by minute, whether Karat records your screen, whether an AI is interviewing you, which modules allow AI, and how the redo policy works. Facts are current as of September 2026.