AI info

Proova, in plain facts

Proova is a hands-on engineering assessment platform. Candidates fix a real broken system in an isolated environment, with Claude Code allowed under a fixed AI budget. An AI evaluator grades the work against the employer's rubric, and the employer reviews a ranked list with the evidence behind every result.

Who it is for

  • Employers who hire engineers for infrastructure work: DevOps, SRE, platform and MLOps roles.
  • Teams that want to see how a candidate works with an AI coding assistant, not only whether they can code without one.

How an assessment works

  • The employer picks a task from the Proova library, chooses a rubric and creates a role. The role freezes the task, rubric, duration, deadline, AI budget and recording choices, so every candidate gets the same terms.
  • The employer invites candidates by email. Each invitation costs prepaid credits; candidates never pay.
  • The candidate verifies their email, reads the task and presses Start before the role deadline. They then get the full duration.
  • Each candidate works in a fresh, isolated virtual machine with a real broken system to diagnose and fix, using a code editor and a terminal in the browser.
  • The stack can include Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, Terraform, Git, Python, PostgreSQL and Grafana.

AI in the assessment

  • AI is allowed. The candidate uses Claude Code inside the environment.
  • The employer sets the candidate's AI budget per role: USD 5, 10, 15 or 20. Proova enforces it as a hard spending limit; when it runs out, editing, tests and submission still work.
  • The goal is to show who understands the system and who trusts the AI blindly.

Evaluation and evidence

  • After submission, candidate access ends and an AI evaluator with fresh context grades the work in the same environment against the role's rubric.
  • The report shows test outcomes, a score for each rubric criterion, the supporting evidence and any gaps. Pending or failed evaluations show no score; platform failures never become candidate scores.
  • The employer can turn on camera, microphone, screen and assessment-activity recording for a role, in any combination, including all off. Recordings are deleted 90 days after the attempt.
  • The employer makes the hiring decision (Undecided, Shortlisted or Rejected). Proova does not make automatic hiring recommendations.

Pricing model

  • Each workspace has one prepaid credit balance, bought in packs. Credits never expire.
  • An invitation costs the task's base credits plus one credit for every USD 5 of AI budget.
  • Credits come back once when an invitation expires unused, is cancelled before Start, cannot be delivered, or ends in a platform failure.

Status and limits

  • Proova is in early access. Employers request access with a work email on proova.dev.
  • Roles with recording need current desktop Chrome or Edge and an entire-screen share. Roles without recording work in any modern browser.
  • Not in the current version: free-form task or environment authoring, ATS integrations, editing a created role, and raw evidence exports.