There were 5 stages I had to get through, and each one goes deep into its content. There's an initial phone screen, then a technical dive into one of your projects with the Team/Project Lead, then a 48-hour Tech Test which will have some assignment that you have to figure out and optimize, then an on-site presentation of your assignment solution to the team, and then two on-sites starting with one coding run 1-on-1 with an engineer, and then a behavioral final 1-on-1 interview, both 1 hour long. I got to the Tech Test but did not pass. The HR person of the phone screen was way more involved in the internal engineering of SpaceX than HR anywhere else, the technical dive was tough questioning from the technical lead who would poke and poke and keep poking into your project's details until he found the limit of your knowledge, and the tech test was a hypothetical satellite-user linking problem which took some serious thinking, algorithm design, and optimization. Some of the tests weren't fully solvable, so you had to optimize as much as possible.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Tech Test - you are given thousands of records of users, satellites, and interfering satellites with their earth-centric xyz position, as well as some linking constraints to satisfy. You write the algorithm to link satellites to users while avoiding interfering satellites and modulating satellite frequency to avoid conflict. They give tests from 1 user to a 100,000 users and the larger cases you cannot achieve full connection. Algo optimization is necessary
recruiter screen (confirm us citizenship, talk about your backgorund, dive into a personal project you worked on, why spacex and why SWE) -> take home OA -> in depth behavioral/system design -> on-site.
First round was a phone screening very quick and painless, the second round was a coding assessment (take home times 2 hr project), the third round was a behavioral where they dove into a specific project
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Why starlink? Why SpaceX? What project are you most proud of?
Passed the behavioral section, was friendly and easy.
The tech assessment was above average difficulty, with a
question involving data structures and confirming if conditions are met for satellite connectivity.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Easy Behavioral Questions (Tell me about yourself)