Harvey interview notes, page 5 of 6

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·Backend Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

Technical interview at Harvey for a backend role, one question but it had real teeth. You pick a project and basically defend every decision you made, including the ones you'd rather forget.

Pick a project you worked on and walk through the key technical decisions: why that architecture or stack, what alternatives you considered, what trade-offs you accepted, and what you'd change looking back.

“This one is sneakier than it sounds.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Coding round at HarveyAI for a software engineer role. It was a twist on a known spreadsheet-style LeetCode problem, which I thought I had seen before until the follow-up hit.

Design a spreadsheet cell system where setCell can accept either a plain integer or a formula referencing other cells.
Follow-up: how would you detect a circular dependency between formulas, for example if A1 references B1 and C1, and C1 references back to A1?

“Recognized it as a variant of a spreadsheet problem I'd practiced before, so I felt decent going in.”

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Harvey·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Interviewed for an MLE role at HarveyAI and part two of the coding round had me extending a spreadsheet implementation to support formulas, which meant figuring out dependency ordering via topological sort. Not the hardest thing I've done but it required actually thinking through the graph structure carefully.

Extend a spreadsheet implementation so that cells can contain formulas referencing other cells, and evaluate them in the correct dependency order.

“Part one was straightforward cell storage stuff.”

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Harvey·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Live coding round at HarveyAI for a software engineer role. The session was centered on a tree-related problem and string manipulation under real time pressure, with the interviewer pushing hard on time complexity throughout.

Solve a lowest common ancestor problem on a binary search tree, then extend it to handle string editing via simulated mouse interactions. Time complexity analysis required throughout.

“The base LCA part was fine, I know that problem.”

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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·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·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·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·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·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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