Karat Software Engineer Interview Questions
& Process
Real candidates share what happened, how many rounds they had,
and how the experience turned out.
Based on 44 interview experiences · FREE TO READ
Candidate interview experiences
First-hand accounts from people who interviewed at Karat.
Karat
Software Engineer
Mid Average Positive experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Onsite
Interview formats
Coding System Design
So first, I had this Karat Qualify, which was like a 15 min offline test. It was all MCQs and I could pick between backend, general coding logic, or algorithms & data structures. After passing that, I got an invite right away to set up the next interview. Then came the Karat Core, which was an online live video thing, lasted for 60 mins. They covered system design discussion/analysis and live coding for data structures & algorithms. This technical interview was pretty chill, I could schedule it whenever I wanted. And the best part, if I felt it didn't go well, I could get a redo. So I booked my first attempt pretty soon after scheduling, so I could do a redo quickly if needed.
Confirmed questions8 questions
- For a mobile app that animates kids' drawings and downloads interactive stuff, how could we cut down on server farm expenses?
- On a sports stats website, how can we lessen the impact when third-party APIs go down frequently?
- What kind of info do we need to guess how much a popular video-sharing app will cost to run next year?
Karat
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Average Neutral experience No offer 2 rounds
Interview process
Technical screen Technical screen
Interview formats
System Design Coding
It really depends on your interviewer. I have been interviewed twice so far and those were completely different experiences - during the first one interviewer didn't care much about my answers, but for the second one, he was a very nice, intelligent person, who was truly interested in the process his name was Mohamed.
Confirmed questions3 questions
- A bit of system design was asked.
- JS code interpretation questions were asked.
- Two problems were asked.
Karat
Software Engineer
Entry Average Positive experience No offer 1 round
Interview process
Recruiter call Technical screen Take home
Interview formats
Coding Technical
I interviewed with karat for another company. The process was pretty straightforward and fun. I could choose my interview time, including holidays, and they had almost 24-hour coverage. I even scheduled it less than 24 hours before on a holiday. They offer a redo option within 24 hours if you want to redo the interview. I thought about it just for fun and more practice, but felt it might seem spammy since I thought I did okay in the first one. The process involves some basic intro questions, a brief description of past projects, and then the main part which is 3 algo problems.
Confirmed questions3 questions
- Solve a straightforward implementation problem.
- Solve a trickier problem that might require algo skills to optimize speed.
- Solve a much harder problem that was asked in the last 5-10 minutes, where there wasn't enough time to write code but ideas and a bruteforce solution could be formulated.
Karat Software Engineer Interview Questions
Quoted word for word from Karat interview reports.
“What are the neighboring coordinates that are 0s, given a 2D array of 1s and 0s and a starting coordinate tuple?”
Read reports →“Find a given string within a character matrix and provide the coordinates of its occurrences.”
Read reports →“What's the difference between kernel mode and user mode?”
Read reports →“What words from a given list can be formed using the characters available in a specific string?”
Read reports →“Can you determine if a path exists between two points in a given 2D array?”
Read report →“Can you implement the routing cipher on the string 's' and return the modified string?”
Read report →“Can you explain the time complexity of this code?”
Read report →“In a board game, you can roll a die as many times as you want. From a starting spot, can you make it to the end of the board?”
Read report →“Could you find the top-left corners of all squares within a binary 2D matrix?”
Read report →Formats, difficulty and experience
Across all 44 Karat interview reports.