Interviewed for an EM role at Anduril a few months back. Got to final round, no offer. Writing this up anyway because I think I understand where I miscalibrated, and that might be more useful than a success story.
Background: 15 years in engineering, managed teams from 5 to 22. My experience is entirely at SaaS / consumer companies. That turned out to matter more than I expected.
The loop structure for EM: Recruiter screen, then a hiring manager coffee chat (non-evaluative, mostly scoping), then four rounds onsite over two days: Technical depth. They pair you with a senior IC and go deep on a system you've shipped. Not just architecture: they want to know what you got wrong and what you'd do differently. I talked about a Kafka migration I led. They asked about a decision I made on consumer group offsets that I didn't fully know the answer to at the time. Good sign: they're comfortable with "I made a judgment call with incomplete information." Bad sign: hand-waving the failure post-mortem. People and process. How do you grow engineers who are already quite senior. What does your 1:1 cadence look like for a struggling IC. How do you make the leveling call when someone is on the bubble. I did fine here. Cross-functional leadership. A scenario: your team is building a data pipeline that feeds a mission-critical sensor system. An upstream team is 3 weeks behind. How do you handle it. The right answer is not "I escalate." They want to hear how you build the relationship before the escalation is needed. Mission and values. This is the round I underestimated. At software companies the culture round is often a formality. Here it's substantive. They asked me directly how I think about building systems for defense applications, what I see as the ethical bounds of the work, and how I'd lead a team member who raised concerns. I gave an intellectually honest answer but probably too much hedging. They want people who have done the thinking and arrived at conviction, not people who are still working through it.
If you're coming from pure consumer tech and haven't thought seriously about defense mission context, do that homework before you show up. It's not a gotcha, but it's also not soft.