The voice interview is how Cadence vets engineers entering the pool. Three prompts, 1 to 3 minutes each, recorded async in your browser. Claude grades for AI-native fluency, communication, technical depth, and culture fit. You need 50 / 100 to pass.
What we are listening for
- Specificity. Real examples, real numbers, real trade-offs you actually made.
- AI-native habits. How you use AI assistants in your day-to-day, what you let them do, what you do not.
- Communication. Calm, structured, audible. Not polished, just clear.
- Honesty. Saying “I do not know” or “I have not used that” is fine. Bluffing tanks the score.
The three prompts (we will tell you in advance)
- A real bug or shipped feature. 90 seconds. Walk through one specific thing you shipped or fixed in the last 90 days. Stack, decision, trade-off, outcome.
- How you use AI tooling. 60 to 90 seconds. Which assistant, for what kind of work, what you let it write end to end versus where you stay in the loop.
- A scenario question. 60 to 90 seconds. We give you a small situation (founder is blocked on Stripe webhooks, or whatever). Walk us through how you would scope it.
Practical tips
- Use a quiet room and a halfway-decent mic. Phone earbuds are fine.
- Outline three bullets in your head before recording. Do not script word-for-word, it sounds rehearsed.
- Take a breath before you start. The recorder gives you 5 seconds.
- If you blank, restart. You get up to two takes per prompt.
- Do not use AI to generate or read your answer. We score for that and we are good at catching it.
What scores well
Concrete numbers (“cut p95 latency from 800ms to 180ms”), specific tools (“Claude Code with the Postgres MCP”), honest trade-offs (“we shipped without backfilling, knowing we owed it within a sprint”), short sentences. Score this above polish and credentials.
What does not
- Resume narration.
- Buzzword soup (“synergize cross-functional” type stuff).
- Long preamble before the actual answer.
- Reading off a script.
If you fail
You can retake the full interview after 7 days. Most engineers who do not pass on the first attempt pass on the second after watching their own playback. We do not reveal the score breakdown, but we do tell you the dimension that scored lowest.
Anything else, engineers@cadence.work. Back to help center.