Hands-on labs
The part of the interview nobody can talk their way through.
Candidates get a live environment and a real brief. What they build — and how they defend it — becomes the score.
Real briefs, not puzzles.
Stand up a working pipeline or environment from a brief — the way they would in week one.
Something's broken. Reproduce it, isolate it, root-cause it, fix it, prove the fix.
Architect a system for real constraints — availability, cost, security — and justify the trade-offs.
A simulated incident, live. What do they check first? What do they say to the team?
The score isn't just the artifact. It's the reasoning.
After a candidate submits, the interviewer probes the decisions: why this design, what breaks it, what they'd change with different constraints — and throws a curveball that shifts the requirements. Strong engineers reason through it. Memorized answers stall.
No single right answer
There's no single right answer. Requirements define must-haves and must-nots — two candidates can build visibly different solutions and both pass, exactly like real engineering.
One real attempt
One real attempt. Submit is final — no retry-fishing, no second guesses. Honest, and fair to everyone who got it right the first time.
AI collaboration
Your candidates use AI. We score how well.
Pretending candidates won't use AI is a screening strategy from 2022. In selected labs, Recio hands the candidate an AI assistant on purpose — and scores what your hiring managers actually want to know: do they direct it well, verify what it produces, and catch it when it's confidently wrong?
Accepting AI output blind scores zero on verification. Catching the planted mistake is the strongest signal there is.
The engineer who architects the system and directs AI to build it — that's who you're hiring next. This is the screen that finds them.
Every lab action lands in the report.
Each step a candidate takes is captured as evidence and tied to the scores it affects. When a hiring manager asks 'why 82?', the answer is one click deep — the exact action, the exact moment.