Telegram CEO Pavel Durov says the key to building a world-class engineering team isn't traditional interviews, it's winning a coding contest.
Coding Contests Replace Traditional Interviews At Telegram
In Tuesday’s interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Durov explained that competitions allow candidates to demonstrate real skills and mirror the challenges they would face working at Telegram.
"If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?" he said.
Telegram Prefers Candidates Who Are Active Users
Durov emphasized that contests also ensure candidates are familiar with the platform.
"What can be better than, for an employee of your company, somebody who has been a user? If this person has no prior experience of using Telegram, their understanding would be very limited," he told Fridman.
Telegram runs its own contests every month or two, and winners are often offered positions on its small engineering team of about 30 developers.
In a recent Android developer contest, the top prize included a $1 million annual salary. Durov noted that these challenges are far from trivial, aiming to produce both the best solutions and identify the most talented engineers.
The approach is not new—Durov has been hiring engineers through competitions since 2007 at VK, the Russian social network he founded before Telegram.
He says this method eliminates the need for a traditional HR process while speeding up product development. "We don't need an HR department to find super-talented engineers," he said.
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AI Startups xAI And Cluely Made Headlines With Record-Breaking Engineer Salaries
In 2025, Elon Musk's xAI recruited infrastructure engineers for its supercomputing division, offering salaries from $180,000 to $440,000 and seeking expertise in Kubernetes and traffic management systems.
The San Francisco and Palo Alto-based roles required experience with L4/L7 proxies, DNS, and Kubernetes networking plugins, while promising opportunities to work on high-impact AI infrastructure.
In July, AI startup Cluely made waves with salaries up to $1 million for engineers and $250,000–$350,000 for designers.
CEO Chungin "Roy" Lee emphasized high cash compensation over equity to attract "world-class" talent and reviewed thousands of applications for founding roles, highlighting the company's unconventional hiring approach.
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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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