HackerRank Launches AI Interviewer Chakra After 500,000 Beta Interviews
After roughly six months of beta testing with Snowflake, Snorkel and Capgemini, the tool conducted more than 500,000 interviews. It combines a real-world coding task, AI assistant and follow-up questions to assess reasoning and “AI fluency,” not just output.
HackerRank made its AI interviewing agent, Chakra, generally available to customers in October 2026, following roughly six months of beta testing in which the tool conducted more than 500,000 interviews. Companies including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini were among the early testers.
Chakra conducts technical interviews by giving candidates a task built around a real-world code repository, which they work through in a canvas that includes an AI assistant. As the candidate works, Chakra observes their process and asks follow-up questions — such as why they chose a particular approach or how their solution would change under new constraints — evaluating not just the final answer but the reasoning behind it.
HackerRank co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said the tool is designed to assess signals that traditional coding tests struggle to capture, including critical thinking, judgment, and what the company calls “AI fluency” — how well a candidate frames a problem for AI, evaluates its output, and steers it toward a solution. “The previous modality of evaluation was evaluating the output,” Ravisankar said. “Now, because of AI, anybody can produce an artifact.”
Chakra is also intended to consolidate the hiring process. What previously required a recruiter screen, a take-home assessment, and a follow-up engineering interview can now be handled in a single session, according to Ravisankar. The company also reported that suspicious-activity flags were 70% to 80% lower in Chakra interviews than in comparable traditional assessments, attributing this to candidates having less incentive to use outside tools when AI assistance is already provided.
HackerRank, which was launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2012 and is backed by Y Combinator, has more than 3,000 business customers — including Amazon, Nvidia, and Replit — and a community of over 30 million developers. Ravisankar described Chakra as the company’s primary path forward, comparing the internal shift to Apple’s transition from the iPod to the iPhone.
Chakra scores candidates but does not make final hiring decisions, which remain with human reviewers. The use of AI in hiring is subject to growing regulatory scrutiny; New York City, for instance, requires employers using certain automated hiring tools to conduct independent bias audits and notify candidates. Ravisankar acknowledged that compliance with such requirements is part of what HackerRank has had to build for, while also noting that automated systems can inherit biases from the data and criteria used to build them.