The Great Tech Interview Playbook
Modern strategies for assessing real-world skills, not just theoretical ones.

Tech interviews are evolving fast — and for good reason. The best teams know that outdated whiteboarding or vague algorithm questions often fail to reflect the way engineers actually work. Today, great interviews are collaborative, contextual, and designed to reveal not just what candidates know, but how they solve problems in the real world.
This session explores how high-performing engineering and hiring teams are rethinking their technical interviews to better assess code quality, communication, and creativity. Learn how to design interviews that feel less like a trap and more like a conversation — and how to create a hiring experience that reflects the work and culture your team is proud of.
Whether you’re hiring for backend, frontend, data, or full-stack roles, you’ll walk away with practical insights to modernize your process and build better candidate signal from the start.
Attendees Will Learn:
- What real-world technical interview design looks like today
- How to move beyond theoretical questions to applied problem-solving
- Signals that matter most when assessing communication and collaboration
- Ways to reduce candidate stress without lowering the hiring bar
- Tips to align interviews with engineering values and actual work

CoderPad is a simple yet powerful online technical hiring platform. We empower teams worldwide to screen and interview best-in-class engineers with gamified assessments, take-home projects, and live paired programming interviews. Talent acquisition & engineering teams use CoderPad to hire developers with confidence. Over 4,000 companies, including 22 of the Fortune 100, leverage CoderPad to conduct 100,000+ live interviews and 80,000+ technical screens per month. Visit https://www.coderpad.io for more information.

Ron Fish
Talent Advisory Consultant
Abacus Insights

Ambra Benjamin
VP, Global Technical Recruiting
Datadog
Ambra currently serves as VP, Global Technical Recruiting for Datadog where she supports all technical hiring, campus hiring and recruiting operations and programs. Prior to joining Datadog, she was a Recruiting Director at Meta (formerly Facebook), leading across a number of functions including leadership and engineering hiring. She also helped pioneer Facebook's first ever diversity recruiting function/team. Ambra is based in Seattle, Washington.

Tim Kamanā
Lead Technical Recruiter
Cedar