The interview process was an initial recruiter call, then two one-hour technical interviews followed by a 30-minute culture fit interview with an executive.

Each interview was scheduled more or less one week apart from another, and you move on in the process if you pass the previous interview. The recruiting team was also very prompt in telling you whether you were moving forward in the process, usually within 1-2 days of the interview.

The two technical interviews were pretty easy and straightforward. The recruiter had told me that they don't do LeetCode-style questions and it's more like "real-world" problems. However, the questions that the interviewers asked me were basically medium LeetCode questions. The recruiter also told me that they don't do system design as part of their interview loop.

First interview was overall fine/easy. Second interview was also straightforward and easy. The culture fit chat was probably the worst interview. Like I said, the recruiter told me that system design was not part of the interview loops. You would think that a "culture fit" chat means being asked behavioral questions -- you thought wrong!

The interviewer started asking me very system design-esque questions, like how I would design a system to process millions of patient data a day, what database I would use, how I would pre-process data, what information I would need to know about the data, etc. No amount of prep would have prepared me for that interview, lol, because I wouldn't have known to expect that and I did not prep for system design.

I felt like the interview process was overall fine up until that final interview, which was a total crapshoot. Since it's a startup, they probably don't have a standardized process for interviewing, and the interviewers do whatever. I felt like the interviewer in the final interview was trying to put me in the hot seat with these difficult questions that honestly shouldn't have been part of the interview. The recruiting team should do a better job of making sure the interviewers know what the interview should consist of and have them stick to it.

Interview 1: The Valid Sudoku LeetCode question, followed by some behavioral questions like:

• "Describe a time when you faced a significant obstacle in meeting a key goal."
• "Tell me about a time you were under pressure to meet a deadline."
• "Tell me about a recent project/challenging project and what you learned from it."

Interview 2: Given a binary matrix of 0s and 1s, replace 0s with 1s if it is not surrounded by 1s in all directions. Then, the question expanded to: if you have groups of zeroes, convert groups of 0s to 1s if not surrounded by 1s in all directions.

• "Tell me about your recent work."
• "What was challenging about it?"
• "What would you do differently?"
• "What is something you want to learn or a goal you have in your next role?"
• "What is something new you learned recently?"

Culture Fit interview: How would you design a system that could handle processing millions of patient data a day? What database would you use? What open-source tools would you use? How would you pre-process the data? How would you handle structured data and unstructured data differently? What level of (healthcare) domain knowledge do you think an engineer has to have in this space?

• "Why Truveta? Why healthcare tech?"
• "Tell me about a time when you had conflict with a teammate and the debates went on and on for days with no end. How did you resolve that situation?"
• "What does culture mean to you?"