HackerRank makes its AI interviewer Chakra generally available

HackerRank, a platform that helps companies assess and hire developers, announced on October 5, 2026 that its AI interviewer Chakra is now generally available to customers after around six months in beta. The AI agent conducts interviews, observes candidates as they work, and evaluates not only their answers but also their thinking and judgment.

During testing, Chakra conducted more than 500,000 interviews, with companies including Snowflake, Snorkel, and Capgemini among those that tried it. HackerRank also tested the product internally. Co-founder and CEO Vivek Ravisankar said Chakra is changing the basic structure of the hiring process, combining what previously involved a recruiter screen, a take-home assessment, and a follow-up interview with an engineer into a single Chakra interview.

Chakra interviews are designed to resemble real work more than traditional coding tests. Candidates work through a task involving a real-world code repository in a canvas that includes an AI assistant. Based on the candidate's work, Chakra can ask follow-up questions, such as why they chose one approach over another or how their solution would change under a new constraint. Beyond reaching the right answer, HackerRank aims to assess harder-to-capture signals such as critical thinking, judgment, and what it calls “AI fluency” — how well a candidate frames a problem for AI, judges its output, and steers it toward a solution.

HackerRank said giving candidates access to AI during interviews reduced suspicious-activity flags by 70% to 80% compared with traditional HackerRank assessments, though the rate varied depending on factors such as geography and seniority. Ravisankar said Chakra is designed to score candidates rather than make final hiring decisions, which remain with humans.