Went through the Anduril onsite for a senior backend SWE role in early 2026. Writing this up because the posts I found before going in were either too vague or too old to be useful.
The onsite was 4 hours at their Costa Mesa office. They pay for travel, put you up in a hotel, the logistics were smooth. Team was friendly. They also gave me a solid tour of the lab space which was, genuinely, impressive.
The schedule: 45 min: Coding round 1 (medium-hard, graph + DP hybrid) 45 min: Coding round 2 (system architecture at the code level, not a whiteboard design) 60 min: System design (full distributed systems design, separate from the coding architecture round) 30 min: Behavioral (with hiring manager) 30 min: Lunch with the team (this is real and counts, they're evaluating culture fit) 30 min: Hiring manager debrief and your questions
A few things that stood out.
The 'coding architecture' round was different from standard FAANG coding. They gave me a real-world scenario: write a thin client that interfaces with a message broker, handle reconnects, implement retry logic. Not a Leetcode problem, an actual systems problem with code. This felt much more practical and was harder to prepare for.
The system design was classic distributed systems but with autonomy-specific constraints. Think: what happens when your system loses connectivity to the cloud. How do you handle local-first decisions. They care about edge computing patterns a lot.
Lunch being evaluative sounds stressful but it wasn't in a weird way. Just normal conversation. The thing that probably matters is whether you seem like a person who'd work there, not whether you picked the right fork.
Verdict on difficulty: Harder than mid-tier tech companies, about the same as a Meta E5 loop but with a different flavor. Less algorithmic purity, more systems judgment.