Karat is technical-interviewing-as-a-service: its own "Interview Engineers" run your first-round technical screens for you, on a fixed rubric, recorded for your team to review later. If your engineering hiring is high-volume and your senior engineers are drowning in first-round interviews, Karat is one of the most proven ways to take that load off their calendars. Here's an honest look at what it does well and where it fits. Karat was founded in 2014 in Seattle by Mohit Bhende (CEO) and Jeffrey Spector. The premise, in Bhende's words, is blunt: "There are not enough engineers in a company to interview engineers." So Karat built a workforce of trained interviewers — its "Interview Engineers" — who conduct live technical interviews on behalf of client companies, inside Karat's own recorded coding-and-video environment. It's a well-funded, category-defining company. Karat raised a $110M Series C in October 2021 at a $1.1 billion valuation, led by Tiger Global, with Norwest, 8VC, Exor, and others participating (TechCrunch). Its own site reports 600,000+ interviews conducted and says 7 of the 25 largest public companies use it (karat.com). Named clients include Mastercard, Duolingo, Roblox, American Express, Intuit, Electronic Arts, Compass, and Deliveroo.

You keep sourcing your own candidates. When they reach the technical-screen stage, you route them to Karat instead of to your own engineers. A Karat Interview Engineer runs a structured, live session — coding and problem-solving against a consistent rubric across a library of 100+ languages and frameworks. The session is recorded, and your team watches the playback and makes the call a day or so later (TechCrunch). The scale is real: at one point Karat was running roughly 500 interviews a day, and top Interview Engineers earn around $250,000 a year doing this as their primary job — a sign the interviewer pool is professional, not moonlighting. In December 2025 Karat launched NextGen interviews, a human-led, AI-integrated screening format, and now markets an "AI Readiness" line to test whether engineers can work in AI-native ways.

It gives your engineers their time back. Karat says clients have reclaimed roughly 1 million engineering hours. If you're hiring ten engineers, that's forty to sixty first-round screens you're not pulling out of your senior team's week. For a company hiring at volume, that's the whole point, and Karat does it well. Consistency and defensibility. Every candidate gets the same rubric, run by a trained interviewer, recorded. That kills the "different bar depending on who interviewed you" problem and gives you a structured, reviewable, more bias-resistant record of each screen. Benchmarking data. With 600,000+ interviews behind it, Karat can tell you how your candidates score against a large comparative pool — signal most individual companies can't generate on their own. Proven at the top end. Mastercard, Duolingo, Roblox, Intuit, and American Express don't stay multi-year enterprise customers of a service that doesn't hold up. The reliability is earned.

It screens the pipeline you bring — it doesn't build the pipeline. Karat evaluates the candidates you've already sourced. It's the assessment layer, not the sourcing layer. If your problem is that not enough strong engineers are entering your funnel in the first place, a better screen makes those interviews sharper but doesn't add more qualified people at the top. It's built for volume. The model shines when you're running many screens against a repeatable bar. If you're making one or two senior hires a year, the enterprise interviewing-cloud model may be more machinery than the need requires. The interviewer isn't your future teammate. A contract Interview Engineer runs a rigorous, standardized session — by design, not a signal of how that candidate will collaborate inside your specific codebase and team. Karat gives you a clean, comparable score; the fit judgment stays with you.

Here's the thing a great interview service can't do: find the engineer for you. The best AI engineers aren't sitting in anyone's interview queue. They're not applying, and they're not waiting to be screened — they're already working, booked on a contract somewhere, heads-down on something hard. They never enter your pipeline, so no screening layer, however good, ever gets to evaluate them. Nextdev reaches the top 1% of AI engineers — the ones who aren't looking. Then we prove them ourselves. We give each engineer a real problem to build and watch how they actually work — so you know they're AI-native because we've seen it, not because a rubric scored them or a profile claimed it. And we don't hand you a recording and a hiring decision. We employ the engineer for you. One named person, on the ground — the contract, payroll, and compliance never touch your desk. Karat leaves you two jobs it was never built to do: find the people, and then employ whoever you hire. We do both. You're not picking the best of who showed up to be screened. You're getting the engineer who never would have.

Karat is the best in its category at what it's built for: taking high-volume technical screening off your engineers' plates with consistent, recorded, benchmarked interviews. If your funnel is full and your bottleneck is interview capacity, it's a genuinely strong buy. If the harder problem is finding proven AI-native engineers and getting one working for you without running employment yourself, that's a different job — and it's the one Nextdev does.