spent some time hiring at a previous company that had a very similar culture to UHG so some of this is pattern recognition, but I also went through their process recently for a principal eng role. here's a breakdown of the behavioral side.
UHG publicly talks a lot about their "Integrity, Compassion, Relationships, Innovation, Performance" values. whether you believe corporate values or not, interviewers do reference them. the ones that showed up most in my behavioral round:
Integrity: they want examples where you pushed back on something that felt wrong. "tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision made above you. what did you do?" classic. they're listening for how you handle the disagreement, not just that you had one.
Relationships: cross-functional collaboration stories. who did you have to bring along, who was resistant, how did it end. healthcare specifically has a lot of stakeholders (clinical, compliance, ops, legal) so they want to see you can navigate that.
Performance under pressure: incident response stories, missed deadlines, something that went sideways. they want the STAR format and they want honesty. a polished "and then everything was fine" arc raises eyebrows. they want to see what you actually learned.
questions I remember being asked: "describe a time you had to balance speed with thoroughness in a high-stakes environment" "tell me about a time you influenced a decision without having direct authority" "how have you handled a situation where the right technical choice wasn't the politically easy one"
one thing worth knowing: the panel includes both engineers and a manager, and they're calibrating independently. i got a follow-up question from the manager that the engineers hadn't asked. prep for different lenses on the same story.
prepare 6-8 strong STAR stories and map them to multiple question types. don't wing the behavioral round at a company this size.