Telegram CEO Says This Is How He Looks for the Best Engineers

Fancy a job at the messaging service Telegram? You might want to look out for the next coding competition the company organizes to recruit engineers.

Pavel Durov, the cofounder and CEO of Telegram, said in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, which aired on Tuesday, that he prefers to assess candidates through a coding contest instead of the standard interview process.

“It’s in line with my overall philosophy. I think competition leads to progress,” Durov said.

“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 added.

Durov said coding contests are the best platform for candidates to “demonstrate their skills,” which makes it easier for Telegram to “just select the best.”

“These competitions are the closest experience to what people will have when working at Telegram,” he added.

Durov told Fridman that another quality he looks for is whether a candidate has actually used Telegram themselves. This is something that he can select for by promoting his contests on Telegram, he said.

“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,” Durov continued.

Durov has previously talked about holding coding competitions to hire staff.

Durov told Tucker Carlson, in an interview that aired in April 2024, that Telegram built its own platform to host competitions.

“We hold them every month or two months. After a series of these competitions, we select the best of the best of the best and they then maybe could join our team, which is just about 30 engineers,” he said.

“This is how we operate. We don’t need an HR department to find super-talented engineers,” he added.

In June, Durov said in an X post that he has been hiring software developers through coding competitions since 2007.

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That was when Durov was still CEO of VK, the Russian social network he founded in 2006. He cofounded Telegram with his brother Nikolai in 2013 and left VK a year later.

Telegram’s careers page listed several openings as of press time. These included roles related to content moderation, translation, software engineering, site reliability, and accounting. The site did not specify how many vacancies were open.

The company told applicants interested in the “C/C++ Software Engineer” position that participating in a relevant coding competition would be the “fastest and easiest way of joining the team.”

Telegram’s most recent coding contest was held between June and July. Durov wrote in an X post promoting the competition that the winner would be hired as an Android developer and receive a salary of $1 million a year.

“The only way in is to win our coding contest that ends on July 11. The task? Implement the animation from this mockup in our open-source Android app,” Durov added.

Durov referenced the contest during his interview with Fridman, saying that it helped to accelerate Telegram’s software development process.

“The Android app. It’s an open-source app. Anybody can take its code and play with it,” Durov said.

“So as a result, we would not just select the best person and hire this person. We would also select the best solution to the problem because we would not suggest that the contestants solve trivial problems,” he added.