Sword Health Interview Questions
& Process

The company reached out on LinkedIn. No recruiter screen happened, and I had to ask for the job description. The interviews felt confrontational, like they were trying to find flaws in my background instead of checking for a good fit. It was clear their ideal candidate profile didn't match the job posting. Scheduling a late interview to accommodate another time zone showed a lack of consideration. The whole process felt disorganized and misaligned. I would not recommend this company.

We started with a screening interview with HR to go over the company and role. Then, I had an initial screening interview with the Hiring Manager where they asked about my background and motivation. After that, I was given a challenge set with the hiring panel, which took a few days to prepare a presentation on a strategic problem (also involving some data analysis) and present it live. Finally, there was a leadership interview to check for culture fit.

First, there was an interview where I discussed my career, projects, salary expectations, and learned about the company. Next, I had a 5-day project with specific features to complete. Then, a technical interview followed where we talked about the project and I answered some technical questions. After that, I heard nothing back, which was the only downside. Not getting feedback on the evaluation period feels disrespectful; a candidate should at least get a timeframe for feedback and have it met.

it started with a phone screen, then a coding challenge was proposed as homework, then a second homework was requested after that, and then one technical interview with multiple people. After that I received an email stating they were going to continue to look for a candidate with more experience on the product domain. the interviewers were polite and seemed nice people. the theme of the 1st coding challenge was aligned with a product the company was building and it is always nice to see a company moving away from LeetCode problems. the coding challenge was in a popular programming language. the coding challenge provided data for testing. My time was not valued at all: I was put through a coding challenge that they had just baked and despite my spider-sense telling me to run, I endured the process thinking the company would accept my feedback with open arms and improve their challenge for future candidates. During every stage of the interview process, I did not see interest in discussing or reviewing my past experiences in projects related to the core product domain (computer vision, machine learning) to better understand my expertise in building similar systems. As a result, no one asked about my Open Source contributions which include at least one technology that is fundamental to their main product. I also contributed with hundreds of answers on Stackoverflow on at least one of the technologies they rely on to create the product and I would be very surprised if during the product development phase, their team didn't stumble upon at least some of my SO answers. But they were not interested at all in my past experiences or hobby projects. The first homework was a fresh challenge but it was poorly designed as a 48h coding challenge as they had just finished creating it the previous day. After doing the challenge, I tried to provide more feedback on this experience during the last stage of the technical interview but was asked to move on to other subjects before even discussing 30% of the problems with this first version of the challenge, which include (but it is not limited) to bugs in their code. I was told more than once that those parts of the challenge that I was recommending them to improve was actually left wide open to interpretation "on purpose". This did not sound true given that they finished designing the challenge the day before I took it and they didn't even had time to bulletproof it. The problems I was pointing out stole a tremendous amount of time from my challenge since I had to figure out through extensive testing (which was very slow given the size of the data) to try to get additional insight on the requirements that were missing from the challenge documentation. The complexity of the challenge and the lack of proper requirements means a candidate should expected to put in 40+ hours of work in two days to come up with good architecture design, high quality code, great accuracy and runtime performance. Most companies that offer 48h challenges actually just require 1-4 hours of time for completion. This version of the challenge that Sword Health proposed was ridiculous! The second homework required a few more hours of investigation into a particular MEMS sensor to understand how it works and discuss some types of problems that can arise using them. After questioning the interviewers about their interest on this particular sensor, the answers failed to explain why this subject would be essential for someone playing the role of Head of Algorithms and I can easily list dozens of homework tasks that would be way more relevant to this role than what they asked me to do. I asked the interviewers a few questions related to the role and team dynamics, and I found that some of those people who would work the closest to the Head of Algorithms had different expectations about this role when compared to the official role description.