Technical interviews run by senior engineers
Give your engineers their time back!
We run the early technical screens and route only top candidates to your engineers - turning the interview stream into a priority queue.
Experience rooted in top-tier hiring standards.
Every senior hire costs you a sprint.
Nobody sends you this invoice. Your roadmap pays it anyway.
And that is before probation. A candidate can pass every interview and still be technically weak on real tasks.
- Applicants
- 200
- Technical interviews
- 12
- Engineers in the room
- 2
- Hours per interview, plus write-up
- 2 h
- Engineer hours in interviews
- 48 h
- Lost velocity: product work those hours did not ship
- ×2
- Offers to extend to land them
- 2
- Senior engineering time
- 96 h / $7,680
- StepUP price for the same hires
- $2,500
Funnel per hire from US tech hiring benchmarks: interviewing.io (Lever data), Ashby, Employ. Each interview hour counted twice: once as salary, once as the product work it pushed out.
Interviews end-to-end, on your bar.
AI-native software engineeringNew
How the candidate actually works with AI: what they delegate to it and what they keep, how they wire it into the development pipeline, how they test what it writes, and how they take a requirement from a sentence to something shippable.
Coding & Problem-Solving
Practical tasks in a controlled environment: problem-solving, debugging, clarity of thought.
Tech Stack Depth
Your core technologies: frameworks, ecosystem, real production experience on your stack.
Data Structures & Algorithms
Fundamental CS concepts, algorithmic thinking and optimisation strategies.
System Design
High-level design: ownership, architectural thinking, scalability, trade-off analysis.
Mindset & Ownership
Cultural fit, ownership mentality, working independently and with a team.
Stream process
200 applicants a role, and one of them is the hire.
Priority queue
- 1Strong hire - book them
- 2Hire, with one caveat
- 3Borderline, evidence attached
- 4No hire, and why
Get a sorted list of candidates - and invite only the best matches to meet your team.
How we run a technical interview
For every interview you get:
- ✓The Zoom recording of the whole call
- ✓A link to the structured report: what was asked, what came back, quoted
- ✓A hire / no-hire recommendation, with the reason behind it
- ✓A scorecard across every dimension you signed off on
- ✓Strengths and risks, named - not adjectives
- ✓An integrity read: our interviewers are trained to catch cheating, technical and behavioural alike - a fed answer, a second screen, a story that does not survive one follow-up
Get a ranked shortlist of candidates - invite only the best matches to meet your team.
Kick-off
Send us the job description
Discovery
We meet your engineering team to understand your goals and expectations
Design
We design the interview flow & rubrics
Alignment
Align the interview procedure with you and lock the scoring model
Candidates
You send us candidates
Results
We deliver ranked results and reports for each interview
How we plug into your process
Verdicts, scorecards and recordings land on the candidate where your recruiters already work - 90+ systems, Greenhouse and Workday to Teamtailor and Ashby. No ATS? On LinkedIn Recruiter we hook in through Gmail, and the CVs reach us the same way. Nothing on your side gets rebuilt.
Talk through your setup- 1
You send the CV
Upload it to our system, or let it arrive from your ATS - the candidate lands in the same place either way.
- 2
We ask the candidate first
They get a consent request naming what is recorded, what is scored and who sees it. Nothing is scheduled until they agree.
- 3
Someone books the call
We reach out and schedule it, or you keep that contact and drop them a Calendly link. Your call which - some teams will not hand over the relationship, and they do not have to.
- 4
The interview runs
60 minutes with an interviewer calibrated against your bar. The recording, the report and the verdict go back to where your recruiters work.
- 5
Results the same day
The report, the scorecard and the hire / no-hire land the day the interview runs - not at the end of the week, when the candidate already took the other offer.
- 6
You sort the list yourself
Every interviewed candidate sits in one list you can rank and filter - by score, by dimension, by verdict - so the shortlist is something you order, not something we hand you fixed.
Writes back into your ATS
The question was never the hard part. What separated seniors was how they answered: the trade-off they took, what it cost them, and where their own solution breaks.
Alexey Borovkov, founder. Former Lead Technical Interviewer at Turing: 1,700 technical interviews with engineers from 28 countries, then four years leading a team of 22 technical interviewers that ran 100,000+ technical interviews.
Our interviewers have run technical interviews for Reddit, Anthropic, Coinbase, PepsiCo, Rivian and Dell.
The usual choice in technical hiring is a recruiter who cannot check the answer, or your own senior who has no time to. One costs you noise, the other costs you an engineer. We run it with practising engineers for whom interviewing is the job, not an interruption - assembled and calibrated at Turing.
Put one interview to the test- We calibrate with your engineers: your bar, your scale, not ours.
- Interviewers with 10+ years in production. Not recruiters with a checklist.
- English by default. Russian on request: the founder is a native speaker with a deep network of Russian-speaking engineers. Other languages: ask us.
- On request: FAANG-depth DSA and System Design.
- 60+ technologies, from Java and Go to Kubernetes, Kafka, Cassandra and Playwright.
- A verdict with the reasoning, not “the candidate seemed strong”.
What we can interview on
What the market says about us.
Mikhail Nastin
CTO, 15+ years scaling high-load platforms
“To close one senior position, my team conducted 6-9 interviews. Each one involved two strong engineers for two hours each. My guys can spend less time distracted by interviews and more time developing the product. Would I use this service? Yes.”
Sergo F.
CTRL+
“StepUP built the interview plan with our Lead Developer around our real stack, and every interview came back with a recording, a scorecard and a straight recommendation within hours. Honest calls on seniority, fast turnaround, and they own their mistakes. After the first 10 Go interviews we moved our frontend hiring to them too.”
One price per hire
We plan the interview with your tech lead, score your inbound candidates, run live 60-minute technical interviews with senior technical interviewers, and send a recording, transcript and verdict for every candidate. You pay for the engineer you hire, not for the interviews it took. No subscription, no seats.
Book a call- Interview plan built and agreed with your tech lead
- Up to 500 inbound candidates scored against the role
- Up to 10 live technical interviews by senior engineers
- Recording and a structured report on every candidate
- Ranked verdicts with evidence, the day each interview runs
Frequently Asked Questions
By a person. A senior engineer with 10+ years in production runs a live call of about an hour, following a plan agreed with your team. AI helps us turn the transcript into a structured report. It does not ask the questions and it does not make the call.
Use it for what it does well: generating questions and summarising CVs. What it cannot do is sit across from a candidate and push on an answer until you see whether they understand it or rehearsed it. Now that a model can produce a good answer for free, that live follow-up is where the signal is left.
If your team has the time and already knows the stack, you probably don't. Teams come to us when interviews eat their senior engineers' weeks, or when they hire for a stack nobody in-house can assess yet. Our first client was rewriting a Java system in Go and had no one calibrated to interview for it.
Your bar. Before the first candidate we agree the interview plan with your tech lead, and they can cut or add anything. One client's tech lead removed the algorithms section and replaced live coding with a review of a small Go service, because that is what the job actually is.
Yes. We run the interview on Zoom with the candidate's consent, and you get a copy of the recording with the report, so you can check any conclusion against the moment it came from. The data is processed under GDPR for your role only, and we delete it on request.
Working senior engineers in the candidate's stack, from the technical interviewing team Alexey built and led at Turing and his wider engineering network. Before we start, we confirm the interviewer's stack and seniority for your role. Names stay anonymous to you and to the candidate, so the interviewer has no stake in the outcome.
No subscription. You pay per hire: $2,500 covers the interview plan built with your tech lead, up to 10 interviews, and a ranked list of everyone we interviewed. You pay for the hire, not per interview.
Our interviewers are trained to catch a fed answer, a second screen, or a story that does not survive one follow-up question, and the report says what they saw. We don't sell automated fake detection: a live follow-up is the check that holds up.
Yes. Candidates can arrive from your ATS or be uploaded directly, and the report, recording and verdict go back to where your recruiters already work. Teamtailor is integrated today.
Yes, it is a separate part of the interview: what the candidate delegates to AI and what they keep, how they wire it into the pipeline, and how they test what it writes. We also evaluate AI-native roles, including engineers working on LLM-based systems.
No. We don't source or place anyone, so we never compete with your recruiters or your agency for the hire. You bring the candidates, we give you the technical read on them.
A no-show counts as a held interview, because the interviewer's slot was reserved. Cancel at least 4 hours ahead and it doesn't count.
Yes. Introduce us and earn 10% of everything that client pays us in their first 12 months. Your client stays yours, because we don't source or place candidates. The terms are on our partner program page.
Yes. A one-hour mock interview in English with an engineer from our team, at a senior software engineer bar, recorded, with a written breakdown of where you stand and what to close. $150.