In "The AI-native interview," Bret Taylor, co-founder and CEO of Sierra, describes the complete overhaul of the company's engineering hiring process to adapt it to the realities of AI-native development. The starting observation is clear: coding agents like Codex and Claude Code are upending software engineering. The engineer's role is no longer to "build the machine" but to "design and refine it." When a single engineer can build across the entire stack thanks to AI tools, competitive advantage comes from the combination of technical capability, product thinking, and business context — not from solving algorithmic puzzles.
Sierra's old process was standard: two coding interviews, one algorithms interview, one system design interview, one culture-fit interview, then reference checks. The new process rests on three attributes: being representative of real day-to-day work, producing rich signal on the candidate's strengths and weaknesses, and offering a positive and authentic experience.
The core of the overhaul is the new three-phase AI-native onsite. During the "Plan" phase, the candidate leads an ideation session to define a product to build, while evaluators ask questions to enrich the proposal. The idea is centered on the candidate's area of expertise to observe their product thinking in action. During the "Build" phase, the evaluator leaves the room and the candidate has two hours to bring their idea to life, using the AI tools and frameworks of their choice, with the freedom to pivot or adjust scope. Finally, during the "Review" phase, the candidate presents what they built: evaluators debate the product choices, examine the code to assess technical judgment, discuss the path to production, and explore how AI was used.
Beyond the onsite, Sierra has replaced the coding phone screen with a system design interview, deemed more relevant for assessing the ability to ship code to production at scale. The company is also piloting a debugging interview in which the candidate receives a mid-sized codebase with a colleague's draft PR, and must review and improve it by iterating with coding agents.
Evaluation criteria are agnostic to the product built, and interviews are conducted in evaluator pairs to improve calibration. Sierra explicitly hires for strengths rather than the absence of weaknesses. Candidate feedback has been enthusiastic: several have said it was "the most fun interview they've ever had."