Oscar Health Software Engineer Interview Questions
4+ questions from real Oscar Health Software Engineer interviews, reported by candidates.
Round Types
Top Topics
Questions
#91 Decode Ways
LeetCode #91: Decode Ways. Difficulty: Medium. Topics: String, Dynamic Programming. Asked at Oscar Health in the last 6 months.
## Problem Schedule or query medical appointments, detecting conflicts or finding the earliest available slot. ## Likely LeetCode equivalent Similar to LC 253 Meeting Rooms II. ## Tags heap, intervals, oscar_health
Medical Procedures: Schedule Medical Procedures Respecting Dependencies and Resource Constraints
## Problem A hospital needs to schedule `n` medical procedures. Each procedure has a duration, a required room type, and a list of prerequisite procedures that must complete first. Rooms of the same type are interchangeable. Find the minimum total makespan (finish time of the last procedure) using as many rooms as needed. ```python def schedule_procedures( procedures: list[dict], # {id, duration, room_type, prerequisites: list[str]} rooms: dict # {room_type: count} ) -> dict: # {procedure_id: start_time} pass ``` **Example:** ``` procedures = [ {"id":"A", "duration":30, "room_type":"OR", "prerequisites":[]}, {"id":"B", "duration":20, "room_type":"ICU", "prerequisites":["A"]}, {"id":"C", "duration":15, "room_type":"OR", "prerequisites":[]} ] rooms = {"OR": 1, "ICU": 1} Output: {"A": 0, "C": 30, "B": 30} # A and C compete for OR; B waits for A ``` ## Follow-ups 1. How do you detect cycles in the prerequisite graph? 2. This is a generalization of job-shop scheduling — what makes it NP-hard in the general case? 3. For a practical hospital with 20 procedures, what heuristic gives good results quickly? 4. How would you handle emergencies that must preempt a scheduled procedure?
## Problem Determine which patients or regions are covered by a healthcare provider network using graph reachability. ## Likely LeetCode equivalent No confident LC match. ## Tags graph, bfs, oscar_health
What Oscar Health Looks for in Software Engineer Interviews
Oscar Health Software Engineer interviews are calibrated against the level and scope expected of the role. Across 4+ verified candidate reports on LeakCode, the consistent signals interviewers look for: clear problem decomposition before coding, explicit complexity reasoning, structured handling of edge cases, and the ability to articulate trade-offs between two reasonable approaches.
The discriminator between candidates who advance and candidates who do not is rarely the final correctness of the solution. It is the path to the solution: did you ask clarifying questions, did you state your approach before coding, did you handle edge cases without prompting, and did you communicate your reasoning throughout. Reports tagged "no hire" frequently cite a working solution with poor communication; reports tagged "strong hire" cite clear thinking even when the final solution was incomplete.
How To Use This Question Set
Real interview reports are a calibration tool, not a memorization target. Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months; memorizing exact problems risks misleading you when the interviewer uses a variant. The high-leverage use: identify the patterns that appear repeatedly in Oscar Health Software Engineer reports, practice those patterns on similar (not identical) problems, and use the reports to understand the interviewer's typical follow-up depth.
Filter the questions below by round type, difficulty, and recency. Focus first on reports from the past 6-12 months; older reports may reference questions that have since rotated out of Oscar Health's pool. Reports tagged with quantified difficulty (e.g., "medium-hard") are higher-signal than reports without difficulty tags.
Round-by-Round Expectations
Oscar Health Software Engineer loops typically span 4-6 rounds across phone screens and on-site or virtual on-site interviews. The structure varies by company: some run 1 recruiter screen + 1 technical phone + 3-4 on-site rounds; others run 1 recruiter screen + 1 OA + 4-5 on-site rounds. The recruiter screen is logistics and culture-light; the technical phone screen is medium-difficulty coding; the on-site loop covers coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral rounds.
Each round is designed to surface a specific signal. Coding rounds: correctness, code quality, complexity reasoning, communication. System design rounds: requirements clarification, design judgment, operational thinking. Behavioral rounds: ownership scope, leadership, ambiguity tolerance, conflict navigation. Strong candidates explicitly hit each signal dimension out loud during the round; weak candidates focus only on solving the prompt.
Common Interview Mistakes At This Combination
Reports tagged "no hire" at Oscar Health Software Engineer commonly cite: jumping into code without clarifying requirements, coding silently for 10+ minutes without verbalizing approach, missing edge cases (empty input, single element, very large input, overflow), and producing a working solution that the candidate cannot explain or refactor when probed. Strong candidates avoid these patterns by following a consistent template: clarify, verbalize approach, code with narration, test with examples.
Behavioral and design rounds have their own failure modes. Behavioral: stories that use "we" instead of "I" diluting individual signal, stories with no quantified outcome, defensiveness when probed about failure. Design: not asking clarifying questions, not stating requirements out loud, designing for a single server when the prompt clearly implies scale, ignoring operational concerns (deployment, monitoring, rollback). These show up in roughly half of Oscar Health Software Engineer interview retrospectives on LeakCode.
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