Karat blog

San Francisco and the larger Bay Area have long been the world’s most iconic engineering market. While many headlines over the last few years have reported on companies and tech workers leaving California for lower-cost markets like Texas, our data shows that San Francisco remains one of the world’s most concentrated and competitive markets for […]

What building and running the first human-led, AI-enabled technical interview system actually looks like When we launched Karat NextGen late last year, we had a clear thesis: the way companies evaluate engineering talent hadn’t kept pace with how software is actually built. AI tools had changed the job, but interviews were still designed for a […]

Toronto jumped nine spots in Karat’s 2026 ranking of the top cities for engineering talent to become the fifth city in the world for elite engineering talent, with 29.2% of candidates estimated to be in the top quartile globally. For years, Toronto has been on the rise as a tech hub. Now, it is North […]

Seattle jumped up six spots to earn Karat's title of the world’s top city for elite talent in 2026, with 38.2% of candidates in the top quartile of global candidates.

For the last two years, the narrative around software engineering talent was simple: talent was dispersing. Remote work, lower costs, and distributed teams were expected to flatten the global talent map. Companies (and top talent) were fleeing the coastal tech hubs in search of something different. Karat’s 2026 Top Cities data shows a different reality. […]

Artificial intelligence is reshaping not only how software is built, but how engineering excellence compounds into competitive advantage. Karat’s latest research shows that AI disproportionately amplifies the productivity and impact of top-performing engineers. Elite talent uses AI to accelerate development cycles, solve more complex technical challenges, and drive innovation at scale. As a result, performance […]

A Practical Guide for Training Interviewers in the Human + AI Era AI use in technical interviews can be detected by observing candidate behavior, coding patterns, and reasoning during live interviews. Common signals include continuous screen switching, instant fully formed solutions, inconsistent explanations, and pasted code blocks.The most reliable approach is training interviewers to evaluate […]

AI has raised the stakes on every engineering hire. Most evaluation processes weren’t built for that. Here’s how the best engineering organizations are closing the gap. For most of the last decade, growing engineering capacity meant growing headcount. You hired aggressively, accepted some variance in quality, and assumed that volume and velocity would carry teams […]

AI-driven legacy modernization is quickly becoming a priority for financial services CIOs, but contractor governance frameworks have not kept pace. This week, two announcements signaled a structural shift for financial services technology leaders. Anthropic released a COBOL modernization playbook to accelerate mainframe transformation. At the same time, OpenAI unveiled its Frontier Alliances program with global […]