Who watches a Karat interview recording?

Three groups, at different moments. The Interview Engineer watches live and scores against the client's rubric. Karat reviews sessions internally to check that its interviewers are consistent. The hiring company then receives a written report and, in most Karat programmes, access to the recording, which its recruiters and engineers may open days later when deciding on your next round.

Does Karat still record you if your camera is off?

Yes. Turning the camera off changes what appears in one tile of the playback, not whether a recording exists. The audio, the code editor and the timing of the whole session are captured regardless, and those carry most of the evaluation. A blank tile is also plainly visible to whoever reviews the video, so ask the interviewer rather than switching it off silently.

Does the Karat interviewer see my resume?

Generally very little of it. Karat's model is a structured interview run by a contracted Interview Engineer who works from the client's question set and scoring rubric rather than from your background, so they typically do not have your CV, your current employer or your application history in front of them. They also do not make the hiring decision and usually cannot tell you the outcome.

How long before the hiring company sees my Karat interview?

The Interview Engineer writes up the rubric scores and notes shortly after the session, and the report reaches the client on a short turnaround, commonly within a day or two. How quickly a human there opens it is a separate question and depends on that company's pipeline, which is why candidates often wait a week for a reply after a Karat round.

Can I get a Karat interview redo?

Karat operates a redo option in some of its programmes, most clearly where a session was disrupted by a technical problem, and some client companies also permit a second attempt after an unsuccessful one. It is client-specific rather than universal, so the honest answer is to ask your Karat coordinator or the recruiter who sent the invitation.

Is a Karat Interview Recorded? Who Watches the Video and When

Q: Is a Karat interview recorded?

Yes. Karat interviews are recorded, and you agree to it on the consent screen before the session opens. The recording covers the video call, the audio of both people, and the state of Karat's in-browser code editor, so a reviewer can replay how your solution took shape rather than read a summary of it. Recording runs for the whole session, camera on or off.

Yes. A Karat interview is recorded, and you agree to it on a consent screen before the session opens. The recording is not simply a video of your face. It captures the call audio from both sides, the video tiles, and a replayable timeline of Karat's own code editor, so someone days later can scrub through how your solution actually appeared. Recording runs whether or not your camera is on, and the person interviewing you is not the person who decides whether you are hired.

The four channels a session captures

Karat runs the whole thing inside its own browser platform. There is no separate Zoom link and, in a standard round, no request to share your desktop. That matters for what "recorded" means here, because the platform is capturing its own page rather than scraping your computer.

Audio, both directions. Your explanation, the interviewer's prompts, the follow-up questions and your pauses. This channel carries most of the evaluation. A Karat round is scored heavily on how you reason out loud, so silence is not neutral, it is an empty stretch of tape.
Video tiles. Your webcam feed if it is running, and the interviewer's. The channel candidates fixate on, and usually the one that matters least.
The code editor. Karat's in-browser editor is part of the recorded session, not a snapshot taken at the end. A reviewer can watch the solution take shape, including the version you deleted at minute 22 and the debugging pass that fixed the off-by-one.
Structured artifacts. Rubric scores, the Interview Engineer's notes, timestamps against each question. Typed during and just after the call, and in practice the first thing a recruiter reads.

What is not captured, in a normal round, is your desktop. For pixels from outside its own tab, a browser has to draw its "Choose what to share" picker, and that dialog cannot be suppressed or missed. No picker, no desktop capture. Client setups vary, so if you are shown one, take it at face value.

One session, traced from consent screen to hiring decision

You accept the recording notice

Before the room opens you pass a screen covering recording and data handling. Read it rather than clicking through, because it is the one place your session's specific terms are stated. Declining generally means the interview cannot proceed, so treat it as a disclosure, not a negotiation.

An Interview Engineer joins and watches live

Karat's model is that a contracted engineer, not the hiring company, conducts the interview. They work from that client's question set and scoring rubric, and they are scoring in the moment while you talk. The typing you hear is normal. It is the rubric being filled in, not a verdict being drafted.

They write up immediately afterwards

Scores and notes are completed shortly after the call ends, while the session is fresh. This is why a strong recovery late in the hour still counts. The write-up describes an hour, not a first impression.

Karat reviews its own interviewers

Consistency across interviewers is the product Karat sells, so sessions are reviewed internally as a quality check. Your recording can be watched by someone with no stake in your application at all, purely to audit how the interview was run.

The client receives a report, usually within a day or two

The hiring company gets the structured report, and in most Karat programmes access to the recording alongside it. Turnaround on Karat's side is short. What happens next is the client's pipeline, not Karat's, which is why the wait after a Karat round is so often a week of nothing.

Someone at the company opens it, days later

A recruiter reads the summary. An engineering manager may skim the notes. Occasionally an engineer opens the video and jumps to one question, usually when the scores sit near the boundary and someone wants to judge the reasoning directly.

Who sees what, and when

Who	When	What they actually have
The Interview Engineer	Live, during the hour	You, the editor, the client's question set and rubric. Not your CV, and not the hiring decision.
Karat, internally	After the session	The recording and the scores, reviewed to check that interviewers apply the rubric consistently.
The client's recruiter	Typically within a day or two	The written report: rubric scores, notes per question, a recommendation. Often the only thing read.
The client's engineers or hiring manager	Days later, if at all	The same report, plus the recording where the programme provides it. Watched selectively, rarely end to end.

What your interviewer is told about you beforehand

Less than you would assume, and this is deliberate. Karat's pitch to clients is a structured, repeatable interview, which means the Interview Engineer is generally working from the question set and the rubric rather than from your background. In most programmes they do not have your CV, your current employer, your years of experience or how you were sourced. They are frequently a working engineer contracted by Karat, interviewing on behalf of a company they do not work for.

Three consequences follow, and they change how you should use the hour.

Context you do not supply does not exist. If your strongest work is a distributed system you built at a previous job, nobody in that room knows it unless you say it. There is no shared background to lean on.
Rapport earns you very little. The friendly exchange at the start is real, but the score is a rubric. Warmth does not move a box measuring whether you stated a complexity bound.
"How did I do?" gets a non-answer, and that is not a signal. The interviewer does not make the decision and usually cannot share the outcome. A polite deflection at the end means the process worked as designed.

The corollary is that Karat rounds reward saying the quiet part out loud. State the approach before you type. Name the complexity without being asked. Say which edge case you are handling and why. On a recording scored against a checklist, articulated reasoning is the artifact.

Camera off changes almost nothing

Switching the webcam off does not stop the recording. It changes one tile of the playback while the audio, the editor timeline and the timestamps carry on exactly as before, and those channels hold most of the evaluation. A blank tile is also conspicuous to whoever opens the video later, so it draws attention rather than deflecting it. If you have a real reason, a poor connection, a shared room, an accessibility need, say so at the start and it becomes an unremarkable note rather than an unexplained gap.

Where OfferPilot AI is the wrong tool

Our overlay is excluded from screen capture at the operating system level, so it does not appear in a screen share or recording. On a Karat round that property is close to irrelevant, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

A live human is watching. An Interview Engineer is present for the whole hour. Capture exclusion has no effect on a person looking at your webcam feed and your eyeline.
The editor timeline is recorded. Code that arrives faster than a person types is visible in playback regardless of what is or is not on screen.
It does not defeat webcam monitoring, a lockdown browser, eye tracking or a second-device camera. Those are separate systems, and screen-capture exclusion does not touch any of them.
It is Windows 10 and 11 only. No macOS, no Linux, no mobile, no browser extension.

Preparation pays before the invitation arrives. Code Copilot works through problems on your own machine and returns an optimal solution with the intuition, a dry run and the Big-O, close to the exact vocabulary a Karat rubric listens for. The company Q&A generator builds a question bank for a specific company and role, useful precisely because your interviewer will not have read it. Karat runs practice programmes too, including Brilliant Black Minds, which offers free practice interviews to eligible Black software engineers. A rehearsal on the real platform beats any article about it.

The short version

Recorded: yes, from the consent screen onward, camera or no camera. Watched live: by a contracted Interview Engineer who does not know your background and does not decide your fate. Watched later: by a recruiter reading the report, sometimes by an engineer opening the video days afterwards. The channel doing the most work is the one nobody worries about, which is you, talking, while you write the code.

Is a Karat interview recorded, and who ends up watching it?