Harvey

Mid-sized

Most of these Harvey write-ups come from Software Engineers (46), then Backend Engineers (4) and Machine Learning Engineers (4). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (30), the system design round (17), the behavioral / leadership round (4) and the onsite coding round (2).

54 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Harvey·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Interviewed for a software engineering role at Harvey and got a design question that looked simple on the surface but had a pretty nasty follow-up baked in. The core problem was interesting enough that I actually enjoyed working through it, though the cycle detection part is where things got real.

Design an in-memory spreadsheet that supports setting cells to either integer values or formula expressions (referencing other cells), and implement getCell and setCell APIs. As a follow-up, detect and reject circular dependencies.

“I started with the data structure: a map from cell name to either a raw int or a list of dependencies plus an expression string.”

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Harvey·Backend Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Interviewed for a backend role at Harvey and got two coding problems. Nothing too wild conceptually but both had more edge cases than I expected, and I don't think I handled them as cleanly as I should have.

Given a sentence and a list of tags, return only the tags that appear in the sentence as whole-word matches (case-insensitive). Partial matches don't count, so a tag like 'blue' should not match the word 'blueprint'.
Design and implement an in-memory file system that supports creating directories, listing contents, writing to files, and reading from files.

“The partial-word thing is where I fumbled a bit.”

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Harvey·Backend Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026

Behavioral round at Harvey for a backend engineer role. Just one question but it had a lot of moving parts, basically a full conflict-resolution story they wanted unpacked in detail.

Tell me about a time you had to coordinate between two teams that were seriously at odds. What caused the conflict, how did you bring stakeholders together, what did you personally do, and what happened?

“This one required a real story with actual texture, not just 'we had a disagreement and resolved it.' They wanted to know what I personally did versus what the group did, which tripped me up a bit because my instinct was to say 'we' the whole time.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design interview at Harvey for a software engineer role, centered entirely on building a RAG pipeline for legal research. The problem was meaty and touched basically every layer of the stack, from crawling to eval. Felt like a real product they're thinking about.

Design a retrieval-augmented generation system that answers legal questions by grounding responses in publicly published memos and client alerts from large law firms, with citations back to source documents.
How do you design the crawling and ingestion pipeline to keep the corpus fresh across roughly 500 heterogeneous law firm websites without re-crawling everything constantly?
Walk through your chunking strategy and how you'd structure the retrieval index to maximize both recall and precision for legal queries.
How do you constrain the LLM to only answer from retrieved evidence, and how do you verify that citations in the generated answer actually support the claims being made?
How do you evaluate this system offline and online, and how do you isolate whether a bad answer is a retrieval failure or a generation failure?
A memo gets corrected or retracted after you've already indexed it. How do you detect this and make sure users aren't getting answers backed by stale or withdrawn guidance?
Your retrieval recall looks good in offline eval but users are still reporting wrong answers. How do you figure out where the failure is happening?
How would you extend this system to support comparative queries, like asking how different firms differ in their guidance on a specific topic?

“This is the main question and it's a beast.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jul 2026

Harvey SWE interview, 60-minute session split between a technical deep dive on a project you own and a short behavioral block tied to company values. The project portion is where they really dig in, so if you pick something you can only describe at a surface level, you're going to have a bad time.

Walk me through a technically complex project you personally owned. What made it hard, what trade-offs did you face, and what would you change looking back?
If the core constraint that drove your main technical decision had been removed, would you have made the same choice? Walk through the alternative.
Tell me about a decision in that project you now believe was wrong. What did it cost, and how did you find out?
Describe a time you took ownership of something clearly outside your assigned scope.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate or manager. How did it get resolved, and what would that person say about the situation if I asked them directly?
Tell me about a time you failed and what you concretely changed as a result.
What is the hardest piece of feedback you have received, and what did you concretely do differently afterward?

“This is the whole first 45 minutes, so the project selection matters way more than I expected.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Interviewed for a software engineering role at HarveyAI and got a spreadsheet-style coding problem involving circular dependency detection. Pretty niche problem if you haven't thought about graph cycles in a while.

Implement a spreadsheet cell system where setting a cell's value can detect circular dependencies.

“The core of it is cycle detection in a directed graph, which sounds clean until you're mid-implementation and realize you need to track not just current deps but transitive ones too.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Harvey AI technical screen for a software engineering role, basically one big design question that spiraled into a lot of edge case discussion. Felt like a coding round dressed up as a system design question.

Design an in-memory hierarchical file system that supports adding files via absolute paths (creating intermediate directories automatically) and listing a directory's immediate children in sorted order. The system must enforce a max of 5 entries per directory, reject insertions that would exceed it, and auto-rename duplicate filenames by appending a counter before the extension. Describe your data structures, parsing logic, and time/space complexity, and walk through edge cases like root paths, trailing slashes, and invalid inputs.

“This looked like a trie problem at first and I went straight to implementing nodes with a children map.”

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Harvey·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed for an MLE role at HarveyAI and got a spreadsheet design problem that apparently circulates on 1point3acres. Part one was pretty approachable, just HashMap-based get and set cell operations.

Design a spreadsheet system with get_cell and set_cell operations.

“Part one wasn't bad.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

HarveyAI's project round was one question per company value, which sounds manageable until you realize you have to actually know what their values are and have a story ready for each one.

For each of HarveyAI's company values, describe a specific experience that demonstrates how you embody that value.

“The format itself was the curveball.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Values round at Harvey for a software engineer role. They asked behavioral questions tied directly to the three values listed on their public values page, so at least you can prep for the categories in advance.

Tell me about an experience that reflects one of Harvey's core company values.

“They literally pulled the questions from the values page, so if you've read it you know what's coming.”

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Harvey interview FAQ

What rounds are in the Harvey interview?

Candidates most often report a technical phone screen (30 write-ups), a system design round (17), a behavioral / leadership round (4) and an onsite coding round (2).

What does the Harvey technical phone screen cover?

Across 30 technical phone screen write-ups, the most tagged question topics are Algorithms & Data Structures (31 questions), Technical Trade-offs (29) and System Design (24).

What is asked in the Harvey system design round?

Across 17 system design write-ups, the most tagged question topics are System Design (53 questions), Technical Trade-offs (41) and Data Modeling (12).