What’s it like to be an engineer at Oscar?

Contrary to popular belief, there’s more to working at a tech company than free snacks and ping pong tables (both of which, yes, Oscar does have). Engineers, product managers, and designers know that it’s about doing meaningful work that excites and challenges you, working with a team that has your back while allowing you to grow and learn, and making a significant impact towards a larger mission.

Oscar has been in the news recently thanks to an investment from Alphabet, which may lead people to ask: what’s it like to work in tech at Oscar, a health insurance company?

To provide insight, we talked to four engineers about what brought them to Oscar, what their expectations were before joining, and what their day-to-day lives here are like.

A few common threads emerged. All four came to Oscar because of the mission, and to tackle big challenges. They care about mentorship and a good team environment. They prize Oscar’s value of “no genius without grit” above all others. And they feel that they’ve grown and learned since first joining Oscar.

Read on for more insights from Chen, Sahil, Young, and Ye, and visit our careers page to learn more!

Chen Cheng, Tech Lead Manager

• How long have you worked at Oscar? 3 years

Chen Cheng, Tech Lead Manager

• What are the biggest challenges to working in health care? Things tend to move slowly as 1) healthcare is one of the most regulated industries, and 2) most partners/vendors operate on software/systems that are not built for fast iterations.
• What is the biggest opportunity for change in today’s health care experience? Smarter data-driven member engagement and care management. I think we can use technology to make more keen observations, intelligent decisions, and effective execution.
• What have been the most interesting or surprising technical challenges you’ve taken on? I’m part of the group that’s reinventing and rebuilding the insurance system from scratch, tying 5 core domains together — member/eligibility, provider data, plans and benefits, claims processing, and billing/payments. Each one of them is complex enough, and making them work seamlessly together is something very challenging but also very exciting.
• What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve been given at Oscar? Don’t wait till everything is perfect. Get started and allow for mistakes. Trying and failing beats not trying and changing nothing.
• What’s the biggest way you’ve grown while at Oscar? I’ve learned to increase my impact beyond individual contributions. I’ve been given the right opportunities and right amount of support to grow more and be more confident in being a multiplier of effort.

Sahil Mehta, Senior Software Engineer

• How long have you worked at Oscar? 9 months

Sahil Mehta, Senior Software Engineer

• Why did you say yes to working at Oscar? People and problem space were the primary motivating factors for me to join Oscar. I was impressed by everyone who interviewed me. I felt all of them were smart, humble and genuinely cared about the Oscar mission.
• What’s a project you’ve particularly enjoyed working on? I am a part of communications platform team that we are building here in Los Angeles. Recently, we built a differential engine system which is an extension to our self-service system called Automat. A combination of differential engine and Automat allows our operations team to reach out to our members based on their preferred time and day.
• What were your expectations of Oscar coming in as a new employee? Were your expectations met? My manager and teammates should help me grow. They should be willing to mentor me.
• And yes, I am just amazed that people were not putting on the fake face during the interview. In fact, teammates and managers are smart and helpful. They truly care about your growth and give their best to help you grow here at Oscar.
• What are you the most proud of at Oscar? My colleagues.
• We often hear about a typical day at Oscar. What’s a rough day at Oscar like? Wake up at 6:00 in the morning to figure out why our clinical review team is not receiving communications from our providers. Being in healthcare, we interact with a variety of technologies in the field, both new and old (even fax!), and it’s crucial for us to design every system for maximum availability.

Young Zhang, Software Engineer

• How long have you worked at Oscar?: 4 months and 19 days

Young Zhang, Software Engineer

• What’s a project you’ve particularly enjoyed working on? The most interesting project has been the PDF OCR project (making images pdf searchable). This project significantly reduces the pain of our nurses who need to read thousands of pages of scanned pdf images. No kidding, the largest pdf we processed is ~4000 pages. Now you can simply do cmd+f to go through the whole pdf quickly, and in the future, we could even use AI on the text for useful information!
• What have been the most interesting or surprising technical challenges you’ve taken on? My major was signal processing, with a focus on image processing, so this OCR project gave me the chance to explore among different vendors (GCP, AWS and tesseract) and compare who has a better AI model to text recognition, which is an interesting challenge because you need to know what’s going on behind the results, so that you can pick the best and have the best OCR results.
• What were your expectations of Oscar coming in as a new employee? Were your expectations met? Company should respect each individual’s opinion and everyone should have equal opportunity to grow and contribute.
• Here managers value each opinion from their team members and you can really make a difference here. Being an engineer, you not only consider tech problems, but you also need to think loud and realize if your design fits our business model, our growth, and other aspects, which is interesting but a challenge.
• What have you learned about yourself since starting at Oscar? I could not only contribute to the tech side, but also could help build a new team (LA office!). Also that the team is more important than an individual.
• What’s the best piece of feedback you’ve been given at Oscar? Slow down and think loud.

Ye Ji, Software Engineer

• How long have you worked at Oscar? Almost 1 year (since last October.)

Ye Ji, Software Engineer

• Why did you say yes to working at Oscar? Interesting problem domain: solving problems of health care, and the strong technical skills of co-workers.
• What are the biggest challenges to working in health care? Keeping HIPAA compliance in mind when building / deploying software.
• Which Oscar value means the most to you and your work? “No genius without grit.” Given the nature of our team’s work, I need to understand clearly every piece of code that our team put out, since they are used by almost every other engineering team. And this needs a lot of patience and effort to go through the code base, and think about what each line of code does and why they are what they are.
• What are you the most proud of at Oscar? Our work helps save lives.