just finished the loop at UHG/Optum last week so putting this here while it's fresh. applied through their careers site, heard back from a recruiter in about 10 days which honestly felt fast.
here's the sequence:
recruiter screen (30 min): standard background check, salary range confirm, timezone, H1B status question. recruiter was fine, not particularly technical.
hiring manager screen (45 min): half behavioral, half light technical. she asked about distributed systems at a pretty high level. "tell me about a time you had to design something for reliability." didn't go deep on code.
take-home / online assessment: they sent a HackerRank link. two problems, 90 minutes. one was a medium-ish graph traversal, one was more of a string manipulation thing. nothing crazy but don't sleep on it.
panel interviews (4 hours spread across a day): this was the real thing. three back-to-back 60-min sessions. system design: design a claims processing pipeline. they care a lot about HIPAA-adjacent stuff, data residency, audit logging. if you don't bring up compliance naturally they'll prompt you. coding: one more leetcode-ish problem, but also reviewed my take-home. wanted me to talk through tradeoffs I made. behavioral: two senior engineers and an eng manager. lots of STAR stuff, conflict resolution, how I handle scope creep.
total timeline: about 4.5 weeks from recruiter ping to verbal offer.
they use Workday for everything and it's... well, it's Workday. status updates were slow but recruiter was responsive over email.
comp came in below my target but not embarrassingly so. they do have real benefits and decent PTO. the work is not glamorous but it's stable. this is a large enterprise, not a startup, and it shows in every part of the process.