What Is the Harvey Interview Process Like? (Round by Round)

Candidates report that Harvey runs a phone screen plus four onsite rounds. The phone screen is a coding interview in the LeetCode style, meaning an algorithm problem solved live. The onsite has one coding round, one system design round, one behavioral round, and one project deep dive. A project deep dive is a long discussion of one project you built. Some tracks add a round on applied machine learning with language models.

Harvey builds generative AI for law firms and professional services firms. Its interviews are practical, and candidates report freedom to use familiar tools. Interviewers encourage you to draw examples from your past work. Harvey does not publish a fixed timeline. For a company of this size, expect a few weeks from the first call to a decision. A recruiter call usually starts the process before the phone screen.

Quick Overview

The Phone Screen

Expect one coding problem of the LeetCode style, solved live in about an hour. Candidates describe the problems as standard rather than tricky. Data structures matter here: arrays, hash maps, trees, and graphs. Write working code, talk while you code, and test before you claim you are done.

The Onsite Coding Round

The onsite coding round leans practical. Candidates report freedom to use familiar tools and languages. Interviewers watch how you structure code, handle edge cases, and respond to hints. Speed matters less than clear, correct work.

The System Design Round

Harvey's design questions come from its own product problems. Reported themes include document pipelines, search systems, collaboration features, high volume APIs, and permission systems. A permission system decides which user may see which document. This round is examined in detail in What to Expect in the Harvey System Design Interview.

The Behavioral Round

Harvey screens for people who care about the product and work well with lawyers and product staff. Prepare stories about ownership, ambiguity, and shipping fast. The likely questions are listed in Top Harvey Behavioral Interview Questions (and How to Answer Them). The motivation question also appears, and How to Answer: "Why Do You Want to Work at Harvey?" gives a full sample.

The Project Deep Dive

One interviewer spends the round on a single project from your history. Pick your project before the interview, and pick one you truly owned. Expect questions about decisions, trade-offs, failures, and what you would change now. Vague answers fail this round faster than any other. Interviewers probe until they find the edge of your knowledge, so claim only what you did.

A useful preparation exercise: write down the three hardest questions someone could ask about your project. Then answer them honestly on paper. If one answer is "another team handled that", choose a different project.

The ML and LLM Round (Some Tracks)

For machine learning roles, candidates report a round on practical language model work. Topics include prompt design, retrieval versus fine-tuning, and evaluation. Retrieval means fetching relevant documents for the model to read. Fine-tuning means training the model further on your own data. Be ready to explain how you would measure output quality and catch hallucinations.

How to Prepare

• Drill coding patterns first. The screen and one onsite round are coding. Grokking the Coding Interview covers the patterns behind most questions.
• Practice document-flavored design. Design a document search system and a permission system on paper. Grokking the System Design Interview supplies the method.
• Choose your deep dive project now. Write one page on its goals, decisions, and failures. Rehearse explaining it in five minutes.
• Prepare behavioral stories with numbers. Three stories cover most questions: one ownership, one ambiguity, one speed.