I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at SpaceX (Hawthorne, CA) in Jun 2013
Interview
I applied via their website. One of their recruiters responded within a couple of days. Next was a 60-minute online multiple-choice quiz covering the basics of C++, C#, and SQL. It had 14 questions, and these could easily be answered in a small fraction of the total time given. I had plenty of time to double- and triple-check my work. Then was a phone interview with their recruiter, in which he asked about some things on my resume and asked me some more technical questions centering on data structures and algorithms. He wasn't a developer himself, but it seemed like their developers had provided these questions. Then were two more phone interviews, each with a different developer on their staff. These were done with a live collabedit.com session where they asked me to develop various algorithms live while on the phone with them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
"Write a function implementing the _________ data structure" (various kinds including Stack and Binary Tree). Followed by, "Now rewrite your work without using loops", e.g. recursively.
Applied online has two round. First being an phone call with recruiter and the second being online with a team of engineer asked about my previous experience and then had a short coding leetcode style question
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Explain a recent debugging problem and how you solved it.
Basic questions about python vs c++, am I authorized to work in the US, stack vs heap, projects and my experience mentioned in my resume, quick introduction about myself and why i wish to work at spacex.
Recruiter screens usually hit: time/space complexity of common operations, why O(log n) beats O(n), array vs hash map vs linked list tradeoffs, and Big-O of sorting. Want me to drill you on these?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
recruiter called, they has a few big O questions and basic DSA