# 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.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/6aa59a1adda786b517e4cedc/f38f7cc4-48be-4ed4-bd2d-48697c038b99.png align="center")

## 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.

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/uploads/covers/6aa59a1adda786b517e4cedc/a9378cb1-d38f-4f47-a8bb-56cc99edd15e.png align="center")

## 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](https://linkedin.com/in/divyanshu-rajput8171)  
**Portfolio:** [https://divyanshu-rajput.vercel.app](https://divyanshu-rajput.vercel.app)