To succeed in the Candid Health hiring process, you must shift your mindset away from competitive programming puzzles and toward practical, everyday software engineering. The team values clean code, thoughtful communication, and a strong sense of ownership.

Prepare to be evaluated across the following core criteria:

Pragmatic Problem Solving – You will be judged on your ability to write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code. Interviewers want to see how you structure your logic, handle edge cases, and reason about runtime complexity in a practical setting.

Architectural Adaptability – You must demonstrate that you can jump into an existing system, understand its constraints, and make thoughtful modifications. This involves weighing trade-offs between speed of delivery, system complexity, and operational maintenance.

Self-Awareness & Growth Mindset – Through the chronological behavioral interview, the team looks for candidates who reflect deeply on their mistakes, learn from their experiences, and maintain low ego. They value engineers who are honest about their career highs and lows.

Collaborative Communication – Whether you are debugging a coding challenge or modifying a system diagram, you should treat your interviewer as a teammate. Explain your thought process clearly, ask clarifying questions, and be receptive to guidance.

The interview process at Candid Health is structured to evaluate both your technical execution and your alignment with the team's working style. Candidates report a process that moves relatively quickly but requires sustained focus across multiple rounds.

The process generally consists of the following stages:

• Recruiter Screen (30 minutes): An initial introductory conversation to discuss your background, your interest in Candid Health, and the basics of the role.
• Technical Screen / Take-Home (60 to 120 minutes): Depending on the team's current pipeline, you will either complete a practical take-home coding exercise or a live remote coding session via CoderPad. This round is highly focused on writing clean, working code in TypeScript.
• Virtual Onsite Loop:
  • Coding Interview 2 (60 minutes): A live technical session similar to the first screen but focusing on a slightly more complex, open-ended functional programming task.
  • System Design & Modification (60 minutes): A collaborative session in a diagramming tool where you are asked to analyze and modify an existing system architecture.
  • Hiring Manager Interview (45 minutes): A conversational session to dive into your past engineering experiences, leadership style, and technical interests.
  • The "WHO" Interview (60 minutes): A highly structured, chronological interview walking through your entire career history from high school to the present day.

This visual timeline illustrates the typical progression of a candidate through the Candid Health hiring loop. Candidates should expect a rigorous journey that transitions from highly objective, practical coding screens in the early stages to comprehensive architectural and behavioral deep dives during the onsite loop. Use this timeline to pace your preparation, ensuring you dedicate equal energy to both the technical coding and the chronological behavioral rounds.

Practical Software Engineering

The coding interviews at Candid Health are designed to mirror the actual work you will do on the job. You will use TypeScript to solve practical problems, implement business logic, and manipulate data structures.

Strong performance in this area is characterized by writing modular code, utilizing appropriate data structures (such as maps and sets for efficient lookups), and explaining your runtime and space complexity choices clearly.

Be ready to go over:

• Object Manipulation & Types – Leveraging TypeScript features to model domain data and perform reliable transformations.
• State & Flow Control – Managing complex logic flows, handling errors gracefully, and keeping code readable.
• Testing & Edge Cases – Proactively identifying boundary conditions and explaining how you would write unit tests for your solution.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Optimizing asynchronous execution patterns, managing memory footprints during large data transformations, and implementing custom type guards.

Example scenarios:

• Implementing a robust validation engine that checks incoming JSON payloads against a dynamic set of schema rules.
• Writing a parser that takes raw, unstructured insurance response codes and normalizes them into a standardized internal data format.

System Modification & Redesign

The system design round at Candid Health deviates from the standard "design a global service from scratch" format. Instead, you are given an existing system with explicit requirements, constraints, and diagrammed components. Your task is to modify the system to meet new business goals.

A strong candidate will approach this collaboratively, treating the interviewer as a partner. You should vocalize the trade-offs of your design choices, such as database normalization versus denormalization, synchronous versus asynchronous processing, and API backward compatibility.

Be ready to go over:

• API Evolution – Modifying REST or GraphQL contracts without breaking existing client integrations.
• Data Modeling – Updating relational database schemas to support new features while maintaining data integrity.
• Decoupling Strategies – Identifying when to split a service, introduce a message broker (like Kafka or RabbitMQ), or implement background workers.
• Advanced concepts (less common) – Handling distributed transactions, managing eventual consistency across services, and implementing zero-downtime database migrations.

Example scenarios:

• Redesigning a synchronous billing processing pipeline to run asynchronously to handle a 10x spike in daily claim volume.
• Modifying a single-tenant reporting service to securely aggregate and display data across multiple distinct healthcare provider organizations.

The Chronological "WHO" Interview

The "WHO" interview is a unique behavioral format that aims to build a complete picture of your professional journey. Rather than asking situational questions like "Tell me about a time when...", the interviewer will guide you chronologically through your life and career.

To perform well, you must show high self-awareness. Be prepared to discuss your mistakes, what you learned from them, and how they shaped your subsequent career decisions.

Be ready to go over:

• Academic Foundations – Your early motivations, your choice of study, and your transition into the professional world.
• Role Transitions – The explicit reasons why you joined and left each company on your resume.
• Key Relationships – How you worked with your managers, what feedback they gave you, and how you supported your peers.
• Highs and Lows – The specific achievements that brought you the most professional fulfillment, as well as the moments you found most challenging.

Example scenarios:

• Explaining a career pivot, such as moving from a large enterprise company to an early-stage startup, and what you learned from the cultural shift.
• Discussing a project that failed, analyzing why it failed, and detailing the concrete steps you took to prevent similar failures in your next role.

As a Software Engineer at Candid Health, your daily responsibilities will revolve around building and maintaining the foundational rails of healthcare billing.

Your core duties will include:

• Developing Core Billing Services: Writing clean, type-safe TypeScript code to power backend services, manage complex state transitions of medical claims, and build developer-friendly APIs.
• Integrating with Third-Party Systems: Building and maintaining robust connections with external healthcare clearinghouses, insurance databases, and electronic health record (EHR) systems.
• Evolving System Architecture: Collaborating with senior engineering leaders to refactor existing monolithic components into scalable, decoupled services as the platform grows.
• Partnering Across Teams: Working closely with product managers to define feature requirements, and collaborating with operations teams to understand and automate manual billing workflows.
• Maintaining Operational Excellence: Participating in code reviews, writing comprehensive tests, monitoring system performance, and debugging production issues to ensure high availability and data accuracy.