ElevenLabs Software Engineer Interview

ElevenLabs describes itself as a research lab that productizes and sells AI tools for synthesizing human-sounding speech and audio.

They have specific hiring preferences, favoring former founders and entrepreneurs who are passionate about audio synthesis and AI and believe in ElevenLabs’ mission.

Their approach to behavior and culture fit will focus more on your experience building end-to-end products and tools than on any specific set of traits or personal qualities.

As a medium-sized startup with remote teams, you can expect a lot of flexibility in the interview process and scheduling, and questions that are more practical and hands-on than discussions.

Below, we break down the complete software engineer interview process at ElevenLabs.

Interview Process

ElevenLabs' Software Engineer interview process will assess your general technical skills and your ability to build products and solutions from scratch.

Here’s a general outline of how each interview looks:

1. Recruiter screen: A brief discussion of your past work, your technical skills, and some information about the role
2. Coding screen: A one-hour test of your coding skills, done asynchronously with CoderPad
3. Virtual onsite:
   1. Behavioral round: A deep dive into your past projects, with a focus on those which you either led or created alone
   2. Coding round: A practical question that requires taking on a potential customer problem and creating a solution
   3. Product decomposition round: Similar to a system design round, you’ll be asked to create a UI and system to handle a particular use case

Recruiter screen

This will be a brief call with someone from ElevenLabs’ recruiting team, or possibly the head of HR.

The conversation may be more in-depth than typical recruiter rounds, as they’ll want to know more about the projects you’ve worked on and other examples of end-to-end work.

They’ll also answer your questions about the company and role, and how they see themselves. As a research lab, they prize contributors who can take their AI research and build a product from scratch.

Recruiter Screen Questions:

Coding screen

This round is a take-home, meaning you can complete it on your own time, and you won’t be paired with an interviewer. You’ll work on CoderPad, and you’ll have 90 minutes.

You can expect 2-3 questions assessing your technical skills. The questions won’t be related to one another or necessarily to the sort of work that ElevenLabs does.

As you’ll be working alone, you will be able to freely test and trial your solutions to make sure they work properly before you complete the screen.

Coding Screen Questions:

Virtual on-site round

When you schedule this round, the recruiter will send you a PDF with a description of the topics and problems you will cover in each interview.

Behavioral round

Rather than covering cultural topics, this round is structured as a deep dive into your background and product development experience.

They will focus primarily on those projects that you owned or led, rather than your experience as a member of a team. They want examples of your problem-solving skills and ownership of an entire project.

Building personal projects or school projects is good, but they will favor past projects that were ultimately pushed to production.

As you discuss these products, you can also share your passion for this kind of end-to-end work and why you function well when granted this level of autonomy.

There won’t be any specific culture questions, but they will want to know that you understand and believe in ElevenLabs’ mission and have a passion for some aspect of their business, such as audio production or AI.

Behavioral round questions:

Coding interview

This round will center on a complex, practical coding problem, possibly focusing on audio file management, video processing, and dubbing, or other common issues.

You’ll need to apply DSA principles to design a new data management system that delivers value to users. They will provide you with coding function stubs and data, which can help give you an idea of the sort of solution they want.

Because these are practical problems, they may already have a solution that they use and which works in their internal systems, and they might nudge you to change your solution to see if you can match their own.

Past SWE candidates have described this as the most difficult round, so using the PDF the recruiter provides to work through high-difficulty DSA and coding questions is a great way to prepare.

Example coding interview questions:

Product decomposition interview

Similar to a system design interview, the interviewer will ask you to draw up a design and specifications for a tool to help handle a common customer issue.

You won’t write code, but you will design a solution that includes everything from the UI to the backend database structure.

ElevenLab’s preference for team members with end-to-end experience and skills means you’ll be expected to be able to break down and understand all of the components of your proposed system, which is where the name “decomposition” comes from.

Just like the prior round, it’s possible that ElevenLabs already has an extant solution to this problem and may nudge you to produce a solution more in line with theirs.

Product decomposition interview questions:

Common Mistakes

Here are some of the mistakes people make when preparing to interview for a software engineer position at ElevenLabs:

• Failing to identify and highlight examples of self-driven, autonomous, end-to-end work
• Assuming that ElevenLabs is invested in a defined culture and overpreparing for behavioral and cultural questions
• Overemphasizing your work on a team, your collaborative and cross-functional skills at the expense of projects you owned
• Not understanding and showing interest in ElevenLabs’ mission or approach to AI and audio synthesis
• Assuming that personal projects that were never pushed into production and subject to user pressure are enough to highlight your autonomous work skills
• Failing to identify and highlight the results of your projects and products, whether good or bad, as ElevenLabs is results-driven rather than process-driven

Interview Prep

Define yourself as a founder: Even if you haven’t founded a company or been an entrepreneur, you must explain your projects and contributions in a way that shows your willingness to own each element of the process, rather than specialization on just one aspect. They’re less interested in cross-functional work and more interested in those who want to push their project into production and see results.

Speak to your passion: As a research-driven company, ElevenLabs wants its team members to be passionate about some aspect of what they do. This doesn’t necessarily mean the specifics of their product, but showing interest in audio technology, audio synthesis, AI models and agents, or other components of the tools is important.

Balanced preparation: Their SWE process combines practical problems, common coding questions, and technical assessments. You’ll need to understand the specific audio- and video-driven use cases of their customers, as well as data structures and algorithms, UI design, and other generalist technical skills.

About the Role

The SWE roles at ElevenLabs may have a specific focus, such as backend work or growth, but like any other startup, you will likely be asked to do work outside of this specialization. Here are some common aspects of the work:

Building on top of cutting-edge research: You’ll need to build and implement products that extend the capabilities of ElevenLabs’ research to customers and maintain the frontend and backend of their platforms.

Create custom solutions: You’ll build services that address specific customer needs and pain points, and develop tools that are easy to use and scalable to serve more customers or industries.

Full-stack work: At different times, you might be involved in product design, infrastructure maintenance and expansion, UI and frontend work, and any other projects that startups typically expect of their engineering teams.

Core Responsibilities

Depending on the role you apply for, you may have a set of responsibilities that are always present as well as a wider range of technical work that you contribute to, which is driven by other teams. Here are some of the general responsibilities of this SWE role:

• Perform standard frontend and backend work that promotes the use and growth of product adoption and self-service.
• Work with ElevenLabs’ growth teams to create purpose-built agents and solutions aimed at particular companies, industries, or cohorts
• Understand and design new services on top of the research team’s work, which includes frontend UI work and backend provisioning and maintenance
• Continually find ways to make the products more intuitive and accessible to users in order to drive growth and interest

Compensation

There isn’t much data available that clearly shows how much ElevenLabs pays its SWEs, but we estimate that they pay competitively with other AI startups.

Job Requirements

Experience

They do not have specific requirements for their SWE roles, but the responsibilities of different SWEs may require a clear skill set, such as cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes experience for a back-end role. Given the highly technical nature of the interview process, you will need to have sharp engineering skills to reach the on-site round.

Education

There are no specific educational requirements or certifications for these roles. They do prize those with extensive experience creating and implementing technical projects, which can include projects you built in school.

Resources

• ElevenLabs Careers Page
• ElevenLabs About Page
• ElevenLabs Blog
• Software Engineering Interview Prep
• Generative AI Interview Prep
• Software Engineer Interview Questions
• ElevenLabs Interview Questions

FAQs

How long is the ElevenLabs Software Engineer interview process?

ElevenLabs is growing quickly and tends to move faster than larger, more process-driven companies. Candidates have reported the process taking 4 to 5 weeks.

Does ElevenLabs have internships?

ElevenLabs does not offer internships at this time.

Do I need AI experience to work at ElevenLabs?

Technically, this experience is ‘preferred’, not a requirement, but given that SWEs are expected to build infrastructure to support and productize AI research projects, it’s important that you have experience, even if it isn’t specifically audio synthesis or agentic AI.

Does ElevenLabs offer remote work opportunities?

Yes, ElevenLabs has a remote workforce, but they maintain offices in Bangalore, Dublin, London, New York, San Francisco, Tokyo, and Warsaw.

How long should I wait after a rejection before reapplying to ElevenLabs?

There is no specific rule on their site, but the general best practice is to wait at least 6 months before reapplying, unless something specific changes, in which case you can reapply sooner.