Epic Systems · Primly Community

Epic Systems onsite final round: how it really goes, what surprised me

market_realist · 4 replies

Did the Epic Systems onsite last month. They flew me to Madison, put me up at a hotel the night before, and I spent a full day on their Verona campus. Here's what I wasn't expecting.

First: the campus itself is a thing. It's enormous and genuinely weird in an interesting way. There's a Harry Potter room. A hobbit hole. A treehouse. Epic's founder put real money into the architecture. It's a little disorienting when you're nervous about an interview, but also kind of energizing. You get a tour at some point during the day.

The interview schedule: I had four blocks. Yours may vary but this is what I had.

Block 1 -- problem solving / coding: Two coding problems, similar difficulty to the OA but with a person watching and asking questions as you go. They want to hear you think out loud. Walking through your approach verbally mattered more than a perfect solution. One problem involved array manipulation, one was more object-oriented design.

Block 2 -- CS fundamentals: More conversational. OOP principles, when would you use a certain data structure vs another, time/space complexity walk-throughs. Not a quiz exactly, more like a technical conversation. They wanted to see if you understood the tradeoffs, not just the definitions.

Block 3 -- behavioral: 45 minutes. I already covered this in a separate post but it's real and substantial. Have multiple STAR stories ready. Teamwork, conflict, failure, learning quickly.

Block 4 -- team/project conversation: This one was with a team lead who walked me through a real feature they'd built and asked how I would have approached parts of it. More of a two-way discussion. I think it was partly about culture fit and partly about how I engage with a senior person.

Lunch is in the cafeteria with a couple of current employees. Not officially an interview but treat it like one.

Total day: about 7 hours. Tiring but well-organized. Decision came back about 10 days later.

4 replies

jp_newgrad

Did they ask any system design questions, like the full distributed systems design type stuff, or was it kept at the OOP/fundamentals level?

market_realist

No classic system design round. Nothing like 'design Twitter' or 'design a URL shortener.' The design conversation was more at the application architecture level, like class design and data modeling. Classic distributed systems design seems to be more of a FAANG thing.

hardware_hugo

For context on comp: I've seen software developer offers at Epic (new grad/entry level, Verona WI) in the 85-100k base range for 2025/2026. Lower ceiling than big tech but consistent raises and solid benefits. Healthcare for a healthcare company is, somewhat predictably, good.

returner_ren

The lunch round being informal-but-not-really is such a consistent thing across companies. I've learned to stay in interview mode the whole day.