Lockheed Martin · Primly Community

Lockheed Martin coding interview / online assessment: format and difficulty breakdown

hardware_hugo · 4 replies

Applied for an SWE role at Lockheed Martin (Rotary and Mission Systems, Moorestown NJ) in February 2026. They sent an online assessment about a week after the recruiter screen. Documenting this because info on their OA was basically nonexistent.

The OA platform They used HackerRank. The invite said 90 minutes. There were 3 questions.

Difficulty Honestly, nothing like what I was grinding for. The questions were: A string manipulation problem. Would rate easy on leetcode. Probably there to filter obvious non-coders. A sorting/array problem with a twist. Medium-ish. Required thinking through edge cases. A more open-ended question about debugging a given snippet of C++ code. They gave you broken code and asked you to identify the bug and fix it. This one tested actual engineering intuition, not just algorithm recall.

No dynamic programming. No graph traversal. The C++ question was interesting because the bug was subtle -- an off-by-one in a loop with a pointer that would cause a buffer overread. If you've never read low-level C++ you might miss it.

What they care about Based on the subsequent technical phone screen, they seemed to want people who can read and reason about existing code, not just write greenfield solutions. The OA reflects that. Being comfortable with C++ helps.

Timing I had 10 days to complete the OA from the invite. No proctoring. They sent a follow-up email 5 business days after I submitted. Pipeline moved reasonably fast after that.

Tips Don't over-rotate on hard leetcode prep for this. Read some C++ basics if you're a Python/JS person. The behavioral component comes later, don't neglect that -- it carries real weight at LM compared to what I expected.

Happy to answer questions about the specific types of problems if anyone's heading in.

4 replies

hardware_hugo

did they give you a language choice or was C++ forced for the OA?

ds_dmitri

HackerRank let me pick Python for questions 1 and 2. Question 3 was C++ specific since they gave you a C++ snippet to debug. so you can get away with Python for the algorithmic parts.

sec_sasha

buffer overread as an OA question is actually a smart filter for defense. they're building safety-critical and security-sensitive systems. someone who doesn't catch that kind of bug is a liability.

contractor_kai

no proctoring is the right call for an engineering role at this level. proctored sessions with eye-tracking and screen locks treat candidates like suspects and filter out people with disabilities or non-standard setups. LM seems to trust that real engineers can demonstrate skill in follow-up rounds.