Optum Data Scientist Interview Questions

This post is about an interview experience for a data scientist position at Optum. It could be useful if you are going through or having one upcoming for a similar position at Optum or UnitedHealth Group. 

Optum, Inc. is an American healthcare services provider with business interests encompassing technology and related services, pharmacy care services and various direct healthcare services. It has been a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group since 2011. And Optum seems to contribute the biggest portion of the UnitedHealth's profits, and has been growing very fast in the past years.

After submitting the CV for the position, I got a call from HR to arrange the interview, and there are two rounds of interview in total:

• technical interview
• behavior interview

Technical interview

The interview consists of two data scientists - one principle and one senior. 

Followed by a brief introduction about each, there was a project description section to describe a data science project has been done in your previous work experience. And there will be some questions delving into the details based on the project description you gave. 

The second part was about a mock project simulation, which has no right or wrong answer, but rather to understand how your thinking process works when you starting a new data science project. And there can be some questions based on your answers as well.

Finally, there can be a couple of technical questions related to data science and machine learning. It seems the interviewers have prepared a set of questions need to be covered. 

At the end, there can be some time for you to ask a couple of questions regarding the position and the company. Overall, the people look nice and friendly during the interview, and the interview difficulty is reasonable.

The interviewers were gentle and kind. However, the feedback process seems not satisfactory. After  more than 10 days, there was no feedback and no update on the job dashboard and I inquired about the feedback of the interview. An HR person said there will be updates and they will get back to me, but it turns out there is no update at the end and after a while I found the job board status is also silently changed to "No longer under consideration" without sending a rejection email.