My Interview Experience: HackerRank Internship ( CTO Round )

How it started

This one didn't start with an application form - it started with cold emails. I reached out directly to HackerRank's co-founders and a few other team members, and eventually got a reply from Hari, the co-founder and CTO, offering to schedule a call.

The call

It opened with the usual intro, then moved into the work I've done in open source - mostly my contributions at the GNOME Foundation, along with a few other projects. I walked Hari through what I'd worked on and the reasoning behind it.

One interesting detail about how HackerRank operates: background checks are handled by the founders themselves. Normally, a founder-level conversation like this comes at the very end of their hiring process, after everything else has already happened. But because I'd reached the founder directly through the cold email, this ended up being my first — and effectively only - step. Hari mentioned this used to be their standard hiring pattern a few years back.

Hari was genuinely kind through the whole conversation. Beyond my background, we spent a good chunk of time talking about what HackerRank itself has been working on.

One story stuck with me: HackerRank's platform had gone down the day before my interview, during Code with Cisco, because of 50,000+ students hitting it at once. Hari walked me through what happened and how they responded - and the point he made was simple but has stayed with me since: tech genuinely gets better by running into problems and fixing them, not by avoiding them. Two days later, HackerRank ran the rest of Code with Cisco completely smoothly.

The outcome

After the call, I didn't hear anything for about 2 weeks. I followed up with an email to the team, and the reply was a rejection - not because of fit in a general sense, but because the specific opening wasn't an SDE or AI intern role. It turned out to be a different, more client-facing engineering track than what I'd been aiming for.

What I took away

Even though it ended in a rejection, this one didn't feel like a wasted shot. Cold emailing got me a direct line to a co-founder I'd otherwise have had to earn my way through several rounds to reach, and the conversation itself -about scaling under real load and about how HackerRank actually thinks about reliability - was worth having regardless of the outcome.

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/divyanshu-rajput8171
Portfolio: https://divyanshu-rajput.vercel.app