I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks.

Summary: Made it to on-site interview in SF. Bad experience during technical interview with a Data Engineer who called in remotely. Got completely ghosted by the recruiter who never closed the interview loop. Would not recommend. Recruiter screen. Take home test (building a small pipeline using SQL/Python). Hiring Manager interview. On-site interview in SF which is composed of 3 interviews (1 technical with 2 other Data Engineers and 2 behavioral interviews with Data Science & Healthcare Economist).

Did not have all the technical experience they were looking for; however, I will list this interview difficulty as "Difficult" due to the interview environment when on-site. During my technical interview with the other Data Engineers (one called in remote and one was in-person), the social environment was uncomfortable from the start and communication was particularly difficult. Within the first 5 minutes, you could tell the interviewer calling in remotely was frustrated and impatient.

If the interviewee does not know the answer, it costs the interviewer nothing to take notes, move on to the next question, and be kind. However, the continual probing of "how come you don't know this if you used XYZ technology for this amount of time" was exhausting and uncomfortable. I was extremely transparent about what I don't have experience with and what I don't know, yet the probing and focus on "how I should still know" was endless. The body language and tone of the interview came off as him thinking I was wasting his time.

For a company that stresses social grace and communication skills for their Data Engineering team, I found this particularly interesting. If the Data Engineer who is interviewing you is getting frustrated during a low stakes interview, I'm not quite sure how they'd behave when we're fire fighting data pipelines together. I'm aware that there have been tons of layoffs and departures from Hinge Health's data engineering team over the past year (appears to be due to politics and off-shoring) so I can understand the overall frustration; however, it doesn't take much to just be polite. Despite this, I had to continue interviewing for the rest of the 3 hours knowing I would not get the role. At that point, you just smile and continue to do your best.

The behavioral interviews with Data Science and Healthcare Economics were enjoyable and went great. They seem like genuinely nice people and people who I'd love to work with. I interviewed on a Tuesday and the recruiter said she'd get back to me with the result by the end of the week. The icing on the cake was getting completely ghosted and never having the interview looped closed.

Unfortunately, cannot recommend this interview process to someone else. Having to deal with a red flag on the Data Engineering team and the recruiter ghosting you makes it not worth the time. They set a high bar for technical skills, healthcare domain knowledge, and communication skills for the Data Engineering team. Wish them all the best and hope they're able to find the candidate they're looking for.

technical:

• During the technical on-site, they will just try to poke holes in your knowledge/experience instead of trying to let you highlight what you're strong at. just be smile, be patient, and do your best.
• broadcast joins (spark)
• indexing, partitioning, z-order, and a lot of optimization questions
• data observation
• handling PHI in production environment for dev use (tonic.ai)
• experience building streaming pipelines (even though it's not really required for the job)

behavioral:

• standard question set
• explaining technical concepts to non-technical audience
• how to prioritize work/scope requirements
• experience with medical claims data