Hiring manager interview guidance

The hiring manager interview is a conversation about you: what you owned in your recent roles, what you're proud of, where you fell short, and how you've grown. There's no coding and no whiteboard. We want to understand how you've operated in practice, how you learn, and how AI shows up in the way you work today. It's also your chance to meet someone you could be working with and to ask the questions that matter most to you.

This guide covers how the session runs, what we'll ask about, what we evaluate, and how to prepare.

Role level	Length
Most engineering roles	45 minutes
Staff engineers and above, and engineering managers	60 minutes

The longer session covers the same ground, with more room for your background and for your questions about Hinge Health. Your recruiter will confirm the length when your interview is scheduled.

How the session runs

45 or 60 minutes · Live · Conversational

The conversation follows the same structure for every candidate, so you can plan for it.

Part	What happens
Introductions	Your interviewer shares their role at Hinge Health, their background, and a bit about who they are outside of work, then asks you to do the same.
What you're looking for	What you want from your next role, and what drew you to this one.
Your two most recent roles	A structured walk through each role, most recent first. This is most of the session.
Your questions	About 10 minutes for you to ask us anything, and for us to tell you more about the team and the role.

1. What you're looking for

We'll open by asking what you want from your next role and what drew you to this one at Hinge Health. There's no right answer. We want to understand what you're moving toward, so we can talk honestly about whether this role gets you there.

For engineering managers: We'll start with a quick walk through the turning points in your career: how you moved into management and how your scope grew from there. Expect a map, not the details. We'll go deep in the next part.

2. Your two most recent roles

This is the core of the session. For each of your two most recent roles, starting with the most recent, we'll ask about the following:

Your role and scope: What role you were hired for, how it evolved over time, and what you specifically owned. "Senior engineer on the platform team" is a starting point. We want to hear the goals and initiatives that were yours.
What you're most proud of: An accomplishment where you can describe what you owned, how you approached it, and what the result was. Expect follow-ups that put the result in context: how it compared to the plan, to what came before, or to your peers. We'll also go deeper on the technical side: how you clarified scope, the failure modes you designed for, pushback you got on the design, and how you used AI to ship it.
Where you struggled: A time you fell short, and what you'd do differently with 20/20 hindsight. We're most interested in what you changed about how you work afterward.
How your manager would rate you: If we spoke to your manager at the reference stage, where would they place your performance relative to your peers, and why? Back it up with evidence such as performance ratings, promotions, or growth in scope. This question can feel uncomfortable. We ask it in hiring manager interviews across Hinge Health, and a specific, honest answer always lands better than a vague, positive one.
Why you left: Or, for your current role, what makes you open to leaving now.

For engineering managers: On your proudest accomplishment, expect questions about how you broke the work down, who owned each part, the riskiest dependency, and how the result compared to the original plan. We'll also ask which technical decisions were yours, and what AI practice you introduced to how your team ships.

Earlier in your career? If you've had fewer than two roles, we'll talk about a significant school project, such as a senior-year or capstone project, in the same way.

We may also ask how AI has changed the way you work, the most recent AI tool you've adopted and why, or how you keep up with how fast technology moves.

3. Your questions

We'll save the last part of the session for you. Ask about the team, the work, how we use AI, or anything else that would help you decide whether Hinge Health is right for you. This interview is as much about you evaluating us as us evaluating you.

What we're evaluating

Career trajectory: Do strong performance and growing scope show up consistently across both roles, with specific outcomes? We look for the same strengths appearing in more than one context.
Relevance of experience: How close your experience is to the work you'd own here. We care more about transferable skills than an exact match with our stack, and if another role looks like a better fit, we may suggest it.
Design and technical depth: Technical decisions you owned in hard situations, including the tradeoffs and the failure modes you planned for.
Building with AI: How you've used AI tools in the last year to ship better work faster, and how you verified what they produced. For Staff engineers and managers, we're also interested in how you've changed the way your team works with AI.
Learning: Whether you own your low points and can describe what you changed afterward, and whether your career moves show you growing toward something.
Communication: Clear, specific answers, with a clear line between what you did and what your team did. We won't penalize interview nerves.

For engineering managers: We also look at how you deliver complex work: breaking a large goal into workstreams with owners and dates, managing dependencies, and landing close to plan. We score against the level you're interviewing for.

How to prepare

Walk through your two most recent roles out loud. For each, know what you owned, your proudest accomplishment and its result, a real miss and what you changed afterward, how your manager would rate you and why, and why you left.
Pick an accomplishment you can go deep on technically. Be ready to talk about scope, the design, what could go wrong, and how you handled pushback.
Have numbers ready. Metrics that moved, results against plan, before-and-after comparisons. Outcomes are easier to discuss when you've thought about them in advance.
Think about how AI has changed your work. Which tools you use, what workflow changed, and what it did for your output. Have an opinion on what's worked and what hasn't.
Be ready to explain each career move, including any short stints or gaps.
Come with questions for us. It helps to get familiar with our products beforehand: Women's Pelvic Health, Enso, TrueMotion, and Fall Prevention.

Our cultural values

At Hinge Health, culture is part of how the work gets done. Five values we live by:

Value	What it means
Effective Communication	Say it clearly, say it early, say the thing that moves the work forward.
Lead at All Levels	You don't need the title to see the gap and take the step.
Hustle	Bias for action means momentum with judgment.
Accountability	Own the outcome and learn from it.
Learn It All	Curiosity is how we scale. Learn fast and adjust faster.

Read more on our culture and values page. If you move on to the next stage, read our technical interview guidance. Questions about your interview? Reach out to your recruiter. We're rooting for you.