In my experience they hire only trough consultant firms - had like 4 different recruiters - from different consultancy companies - reach out to me for the same role. The process depends on the consultancy firm I guess, after they got interested in me, I had a 2h interview and the interviewer told me the client wanted to know all those things. So, about 1h20m answering questions about everything - from infrastructure, to database, backend, frontend, architecture and all. After you're very tired of a extensive Q&A, you have 40 minutes to implement the system design challenge. Long story short: If you fail the design challenge you're gone. It's wasn't a hard challenge, but it's a lot to keep focused on for 2h, and I think the system design time window should be longer if that's what's gonna weight more in the end, probably removing some Q&A questions that you can evaluate from the system design.

I was cold emailed by on their internal recruiters. I did an intro call which was super friendly and then passed over to Karat for a tech screen. The tech screen was...weird. The person interviewing me was not even from Boulevard and was a little hard to understand. The interview was an hour long and consisted of some rapid fire System Design Questions, a Leetcode Medium and a Leetcode Hard all in 1 hour. I was not really told much about the System Design interview beforehand and the interviewer was simply just recording answers. Got a rejection stating that even though I was able to do the coding question fine they felt like I was not able to design systems lol...based on a weird ten minute rapid fire session conducted by a disengaged proxy. From what I have read on them, they seem overly nitpicky which is why they mass recruit people and just throw them at Karat. Very disrespectful and indicative of bad culture.