Case Study
How Harmattan AI is Scaling Technical Hiring with CoderPad: 500 Employees in Two Years
How a defense-tech startup built technical hiring to keep pace with hypergrowth
Faced with explosive applicant volume and a highly specialized hiring bar, Harmattan uses CoderPad to verify skills early, protect engineering time, and move exceptional technical talent forward faster.
Founded in 2024, Harmattan AI is on track to reach 500 employees by the end of 2026. With CoderPad, the team can move quickly through a rapidly growing volume of candidates while maintaining a high technical bar as the company scales.
The challenge: Scaling technical excellence at speed
Harmattan AI has grown at remarkable speed.
Founded in Paris in 2024, the defense-tech company is on track to reach 500 employees by the end of 2026, with roughly 70% of the company focused on R&D.
For Harmattan AI, hiring great technical talent is foundational to that growth, and to its ambition to build world-class autonomous systems.
I really want the company to put a lot of effort in recruitment because that’s the basis for everything.
As the company became better known, candidate volume surged. One role generated 1,400-1,600 applications in just 36 hours.
At that scale, Harmattan AI needed to identify strong technical candidates earlier in the process. With engineering time at a premium and hiring volumes increasing rapidly, the team couldn’t afford to discover late in the interview process that a candidate didn’t meet the required technical bar.
The challenge was clear: assess technical fundamentals early, while keeping the process fast and straightforward for candidates.
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A platform the team already knew
When the need for a technical assessment platform emerged, CoderPad was already familiar to many people across Harmattan AI.
Members of both the Talent Acquisition and engineering teams had used the platform in previous companies, including Harmattan AI's CTO and several of its early engineers. That existing experience made CoderPad the clear winner as the company began formalizing its technical hiring process.
All of the people in the team recommended CoderPad, so it was just a natural choice.
Harmattan AI initially introduced with CoderPad Interview for live technical interviews. As recruitment accelerated and application volumes grew, the team added CoderPad Screen to assess technical fundamentals earlier in the process.
The solution: An early signal, followed by deeper evaluation
Candidates now begin with a short CoderPad Screen designed to assess fundamentals required for the role.The assessment is intentionally concise, taking 20 minutes or less.
A 20 minute CoderPad Screen gives us enough signal. We then know if they have the basics we want.
Candidates who progress then move into a live technical interview, where Harmattan AI engineers can explore their technical abilities, problem-solving approach and way of thinking in greater depth. The combination creates a simple progression: establish the fundamentals early, then dedicate engineering time to deeper technical evaluation.
As Harmattan AI has scaled, usage has followed. Monthly CoderPad Screen volume increased 16x in ten months, alongside growing use of live technical interviews.
Assessing highly specialized technical profiles
Harmattan AI's technical hiring extends far beyond software engineering.
Its R&D teams span software, AI, GNC, electrical engineering, hardware and other specialized disciplines. Assessments therefore need to reflect the technical realities of each role rather than rely on a one-size-fits-all coding test.
Harmattan AI creates assessments leveraging CoderPad's existing question bank and its own custom questions. Their tests cover areas such as sensor fusion, controls and modeling, as well as technologies including Python, SciPy, C++ and Rust.
Despite that specialization, the process remains easy to manage. Engineering teams define the technical requirements and what they expect from candidates, while Talent Acquisition can translate those requirements into assessments and adapt them as hiring needs evolve.
It’s so easy to understand and so easy to create something from scratch without having the technical knowledge. I’m not an engineer, but I can do it by myself.
This gives Harmattan AI the flexibility to adapt its assessment process as new teams and technical disciplines emerge, without requiring engineers to manage every iteration themselves.
Maintaining a high technical bar through growth
Building a 500-person company in two years, with around 70% of the workforce in R&D, requires a hiring model that can scale alongside the organization. For Harmattan AI, speed and selectivity have to go together.
CoderPad provides an early technical signal before the candidates enter deeper interviews, allowing engineering teams to focus their time where it adds the most value. At the same time, tailored assessments help Harmattan AI evaluate candidates against the requirements of increasingly specialized roles.
As Harmattan AI continues to grow, the objective remains the same: hire exceptional technical talent at speed, while maintaining the standards required to build the next generation of autonomous systems.