Karat conducts a live 60-minute technical assessment for its clients. You work with a professional Interview Engineer in a browser-based IDE; it is not an automated coding test. The current format includes a brief introduction, about 10 minutes of discussion questions, and about 40 minutes of programming questions. The client role determines the specific content.

When to Expect the OA for Your Role

The hiring company sends the Karat invitation when you reach the technical-screen stage. Select an available time slot, check your equipment, and join the interview. Karat offers evening and weekend interview times. The screen may cover previous projects, relevant domain knowledge, algorithms, data structures, and multi-part coding. Specialized roles may place greater emphasis on domain knowledge or system design. Use the job description or recruiter notes to identify the priorities for your role.

Does Your Online Assessment Matter?

Karat evaluates your coding performance. The interviewer takes notes on your problem-solving and communication, then sends the recording and a performance summary to the hiring company. The hiring company decides whether you advance. The interview does not have a universal passing score. Ask clarifying questions and explain major decisions aloud. The evaluation shows how you work and how your code runs.

Compiled List of Karat OA Question Types

These problems cover logs, string grouping, graphs, intervals, frequency maps, caches, and multi-step state changes.

1. Group Anagrams — canonical keys and hash-based grouping.
2. Subdomain Visit Count — parsing and hierarchical aggregation.
3. Course Schedule — dependency graphs and cycle detection.
4. Number of Islands — connected-component traversal.
5. Merge Intervals — sorting and overlap consolidation.
6. Design Hit Counter — time-window state management.
7. Evaluate Division — weighted graph traversal.
8. Top K Frequent Elements — counting with heap or bucket selection.
9. Valid Parentheses — stack discipline and malformed-input checks.
10. LRU Cache — constant-time lookup and recency updates.

Karat Interview Questions

Recently asked in real interviews

These questions were asked recently in real Karat interviews. Practice these and 4,000+ other questions from 1,000+ companies on Lodely.

Writing Application

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Catch Cheaters

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Domain Analysis

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Systems Design Question List

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Domain Knowledge Questions List

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How to Prepare and Pass the Karat Online Assessment

Explain your reasoning aloud so the interviewer can follow it. Run three realistic mock interviews. In each one, briefly explain a project, answer a couple of fundamentals questions, and code for 40 minutes. While coding, discuss the constraints and tests. Use the language you are most comfortable with. Review its collections, sorting functions, and string functions. Karat allows references for syntax and language details, but you must explain your code. Use Lodely to practice company questions, coding problems, system design, and behavioral questions in one place.

Karat Interview Question Breakdown

Subdomain Visit Count

Type: Parsing and aggregation. Prompt: Aggregate counts for hostnames and their parent domains. The Trick: Each input contains multiple keys that require normalization. What It Tests: String manipulation, map updates, and careful output construction.

Course Schedule

Type: Directed graph. Prompt: Determine whether all dependencies can be fulfilled. The Trick: A cycle makes it impossible to fulfill all dependencies. What It Tests: Graph modeling, traversal states, and complexity analysis.

Design Hit Counter

Type: stateful design. Prompt: Track events within a moving time window. Approach: Expire entries without scanning the entire collection. This tests data-structure selection and explanation of invariants.

What Comes After the Online Assessment

Once Karat sends you the interview recording and a summary of your performance, the recruiter will then decide what next step to take with you. The next step depends on the client's process and may be another technical round, a system design round, a behavioral interview, or a team conversation. While the questions and tradeoffs from the previous step are fresh, write them down so you can discuss them consistently in the next step.

Conclusion

The most complete preparation is a live mock that includes discussion, coding, testing, and explanation. Lodely provides targeted follow-up questions for the employer using the Karat screen.