Interview format

Agentic Coding

Overview

Perplexity’s Agentic Coding interviews are technical implementation exercises that require candidates to use frontier agents, paired with their own judgment and expertise, to solve a technical problem.

Asynchronous format

Many Agentic Coding interviews are administered asynchronously (i.e., as at-home exercises). These interviews are spiritually similar to Perplexity’s Spike Round. The main differences are:

• Scope: Agentic Coding interviews are more narrowly scoped than Spike Rounds. They focus on a specific technical problem, rather than allowing candidates to steer their own project.
• Duration: Due to the narrower scope, Agentic Coding interviews are typically fixed in length at 3 hours.
• Evaluation criteria: The evaluation criteria for asynchronous Agentic Coding interviews are similar to those for Spike Rounds, with appropriate adjustments for the narrower scope and shorter duration.

Synchronous format

Some Agentic Coding interviews are administered as live exercises. These interviews are spiritually similar to Perplexity’s Hands-on Coding interviews. The main differences are:

• Duration: Synchronous Agentic Coding interviews can be anywhere between 60 and 120 minutes in length.
• Coding agents: Synchronous Agentic Coding interviews permit the use of coding agents.
• Environment: Synchronous Agentic Coding interviews typically do not use a CoderPad environment.
• Evaluation criteria: Synchronous Agentic Coding interviews are evaluated on similar dimensions as Hands-on Coding interviews, but with appropriately higher expectations for scope, depth, and quality of work.