I left my Staff Engineer job at a FAANG company to build an AI mock interviewer. Here's the observation that wouldn't leave me alone.
Before going independent, I spent years as a Staff Engineer at a FAANG company, including a lot of time interviewing and debriefing candidates.
After enough debrief sessions, a pattern becomes impossible to ignore.
Candidates who fail rarely fail because they couldn't solve the problem. They fail because they couldn't communicate while solving it. They skip clarifying questions, jump straight to code, go silent when they hit a wall, and present a solution without acknowledging its trade-offs. Technically capable people, leaving a bad signal.
These are learnable skills. But the tooling to practice them doesn't really exist.
LeetCode is excellent at what it does, drilling problem-solving patterns. But it has no opinion on how you think out loud, how you handle ambiguity, or how you respond when an interviewer pushes back on your approach. Those things are invisible to it.
That observation stuck with me long enough that I eventually built something around it.
What I built
intervu.dev is an AI-powered mock coding interview that simulates the full interview experience - the communication layer, not just the problem.
The AI interviewer:
- Asks clarifying questions back if you don't ask them first
- Probes your approach before you start coding
- Pushes back on trade-offs you haven't addressed
- Evaluates how you handle pressure, not just whether you get the right answer
At the end, feedback covers communication clarity, how you handled ambiguity, code quality, and overall interview signal , the same dimensions real interviewers use in debrief.
You can also drop in any LeetCode URL and run it as a mock interview. A lot of people have solved a problem dozens of times but have never actually interviewed on it. That turned out to be a surprisingly popular use case.
Where I am
It's live, free to try, and I'm iterating based on real usage. First time building and distributing a product solo - very different from shipping inside a big company.
If you've interviewed at a top company recently, does the interviewer behavior feel authentic? I'm particularly curious whether the follow-up questions feel natural or mechanical.
And if you've made the jump from big tech to indie, what do you wish you'd known about distribution earlier?
