2026 CVS Health Staff SWE Hiring Manager and Coding Rounds (Hiring Level Not Reported): 1 Experience

Coverage: One candidate's three interview rounds for a full-time Staff Software Engineer role at CVS Health, after applying online: a hiring manager conversation, a coding round, then a second hiring manager conversation. The report's interview period is July–September 2026, and it was posted on November 3, 2026. Its stage field calls this a technical phone interview. The report gives a job title but no years of experience or earlier jobs, so the hiring level isn't known.

What came up

Both hiring manager rounds mixed behavioral questions with basic technical questions. The first covered the Singleton pattern, including a thread-safe one in Java, along with thread safety and UNION versus UNION ALL in SQL. The second included an open-ended public API design question. The coding round between them had two tasks, a per-client rate limiter and a feature-flag check.

Questions we found

Coding

Java and SQL Knowledge

API Design

Technical Background

1 detailed candidate timeline

01: Java and SQL basics, two coding tasks and an open API question

Interview period: 2026 Q3 · Report date: November 3, 2026 · Role: Staff software engineer, full-time · Degree listed: Master's · Candidate's rating: Negative experience, easy difficulty · Result: Did not pass

Round 1: Hiring manager

Alongside some behavioral questions, the hiring manager asked about fundamentals: the Singleton pattern, a thread-safe Singleton in Java, thread safety, and UNION versus UNION ALL in SQL.

Round 2: Coding

Two tasks. One was a rate limiter that tracks each client or key on its own over a time window, practiced as Per-Client Sliding-Window Rate Limiter. The report doesn't say which kind of window was meant or whether rejected requests count. The practice version uses a sliding window, leaves rejected requests out of the count and takes all the requests in one call, and those choices are FastPrep's.

The other was a feature-flag check that answers yes or no for one feature and one user, practiced as Feature Flag Evaluation. The report doesn't say what a flag holds or how it's checked. In the practice version, a flag has an on/off switch, an allow list and a rollout percentage, checked in that order, and all the queries come in one call. Those choices are FastPrep's.

Round 3: Hiring manager again

Round 3 was another hiring manager conversation, with the same mix as round 1: behavioral questions alongside technical ones. The technical side had two parts: whether the candidate had worked with React or AngularJS, and a broad public API design prompt. That prompt said the API would serve a few hundred people outside the company every day, but not what it was for. What the interviewer wanted was the general set of concerns any API design has to handle. The round's purpose stayed unclear to the candidate.