HackerRank launches Chakra, an AI interviewer that collapses three hiring rounds into one

HackerRank is rolling out Chakra this week, an AI agent that runs technical interviews end to end — not just grading answers but tracking how a candidate thinks. After roughly six months in beta, the product is now generally available. Chief executive Vivek Ravisankar says the beta logged more than half a million interviews across customers including Snowflake, Snorkel, Capgemini and HackerRank itself.

Here is how it works: the candidate gets a task inside a real codebase, with a built-in AI assistant at their side. As they work, the system fires contextual follow-ups — why that approach, how would the solution change under a new constraint. The goal, Ravisankar says, is to capture signals traditional tests miss: critical thinking, judgment and what the company calls "AI steering" — the ability to frame a problem for a model, evaluate its output and steer it toward a working solution.

Chakra folds three separate stages — recruiter screen, take-home assignment, follow-up engineering interview — into a single session. The obvious worry: giving candidates AI access during the interview invites cheating. Beta data tells the opposite story. Suspicious flags dropped 70% to 80% versus HackerRank's classic tests, with variation by geography and seniority. The company's read: when the tools are out in the open, the incentive to reach for hidden ones evaporates.

This is a counter-bet for a company built on the old model. Founded in 2012 and backed by Y Combinator, HackerRank grew on classic coding challenges — 3,000 enterprise customers including Amazon, Nvidia, Clay and Replit, plus a community of over 30 million developers. Chakra signals a different direction. The old yardstick measured whether a developer could solve algorithmic puzzles; Ravisankar argues AI has made that proxy less relevant for actual engineering ability. He compares the internal shift to Apple moving from the iPod to the iPhone — the legacy product still has value, but the new one shows where the company is headed.