Optum Data Scientist Interview Questions
& Process

The process had three rounds total. The first two were technical, and the last was HR. For the first round, it was a live coding situation where they gave a data science task focused on data preprocessing, data transformation, handling missing data, and label encoding. Then I had to train an ML model of my choice and evaluate it using metrics like F1 score. After passing that, I got invited for a technical round later that day. It was a discussion about my background and resume projects, especially ML/DL ones. They then asked detailed questions about LLMs, Lora, GRPO, QLoRA, and the transformer architecture. After that, they asked about traditional ML algorithms like boosting algorithms, and also about class imbalance. If you passed this round, you'd get called for an HR round the next day, and that meant you were hired. I didn't get called for that round and received a rejection email on the fourth day.

The interview process had 2 rounds, one online and one F2F onsite at their GGN office. The HR discussion was really bad, with multiple HRs calling for different things like expectation setting and follow-ups. They didn't seem to manage things well internally, and didn't follow up on revised expectations when I had competing offers. Based on their shallow understanding, they didn't give me an offer even though I cleared all rounds successfully and invested a lot of time.

I went through 2 interview rounds and they both went really well, the interviewers were lovely. After the second round, I was told the interviewers were really impressed. The recruiter then asked about my relocation process, which was going fine. He mentioned, 'unofficially,' that everything looked good and I should expect an offer that same week. However, when I mentioned I was going on a short trip the next day, the recruiter seemed annoyed. He questioned me about my trip and his whole attitude changed. I thought this shouldn't impact the process since my notice period was only 2-4 weeks anyway. The next day, he called to say they had selected someone internally and I was out of the running. It was quite bizarre. My advice is to avoid mentioning any travel plans or anything about your home country, as they might use it against you for unclear reasons.