# Interview Format Heatmap: Round Types by Company Segment (2026)

Source: https://www.techinterview.org/interview-format-heatmap/
Updated: 2026-09-05 · techinterview.org

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Interview Format Heatmap: Round Types by Company SegmentWhich round types (coding, system design, behavioral, take-home, ML/research) each company segment’s interview guides actually mention, keyword-scanned from our own guide text.

**375** guides scanned**62.7%** unclassified**TL;DR —** AI Labs guides mention take-home assignments 50% of the time and ML/research rounds 42.1% of the time — Big Tech guides mention those at 8.3% and 0%. Big Tech guides mention both coding and system design 100% of the time, vs. 71.6% and 75.7% for Fintech. 235 of 375 guides (62.7%) carry no segment tag at all — a real coverage gap, see the Unclassified row rather than assuming every guide fits one of the four labeled segments.Every techinterview.org company guide gets keyword-scanned for mentions of five interview round types: coding, system design, behavioral, take-home, and ML/research. The grid below cross-tabs those mentions against company segment, so you can see, for instance, that AI labs lean hard on take-home projects and ML rounds while Big Tech leans almost entirely on live coding and system design. Columns are ordered System Design, Coding, Behavioral, Take-Home, ML/Research, by how often each round type is mentioned across the whole corpus.

| Segment | System Design | Coding | Behavioral | Take-Home | ML/Research |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Fintechn=74 | 75.7%n=56 | 71.6%n=53 | 68.9%n=51 | 35.1%n=26 | 8.1%n=6 |
| AI Labsn=38 | 97.4%n=37 | 73.7%n=28 | 52.6%n=20 | 50%n=19 | 42.1%n=16 |
| Hardware*n=16 | 75%n=12 | 75%n=12 | 87.5%n=14 | 12.5%n=2 | 6.2%n=1 |
| Big Tech*n=12 | 100%n=12 | 100%n=12 | 91.7%n=11 | 8.3%n=1 | 0%n=0 |
| Unclassifiedn=235 | 97%n=228 | 70.6%n=166 | 56.2%n=132 | 24.3%n=57 | 5.5%n=13 |

  * Hardware and Big Tech: small sample, read directionally.

  Click a cell (or press Enter/Space) to see which companies’ guides make up that percentage. Hover for the exact count.

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methodology, as of September 5, 2026This is an automated keyword scan of each guide’s published text, not a verified per-company loop structure. A company is counted as offering a round type if that round type’s keyword (coding, system design, behavioral, take-home, ML/research) appears one or more times anywhere in its guide — a single mention counts the same as a guide that describes that round in detail, and a guide that offers a round but never names it in text won’t be counted at all. Segment tags (Fintech, AI Labs, Hardware, Big Tech) come from a separate classification pass that has not reached most of the corpus: 235 of 375 guides (62.7%) are Unclassified, the largest single row in this grid, not a rounding error. Treat every percentage here as directional, and check the linked guide before drawing a conclusion about a specific company’s actual loop.
## Keep going
Every example company in the grid links to its full interview guide. For the complete set, see the [company interview guides](/companies/) hub.