Just finished the Lockheed Martin software engineer interview process for a position in their Missiles and Fire Control business area, Courtland AL site. Applied for a mid-level SWE role (think IC3-IC4 equivalent in big-tech parlance, though LM doesn't use those labels). Sharing the full loop because I couldn't find anything recent when I was prepping.
Total timeline: applied online in early January 2026, heard from a recruiter 10 days later. Whole thing took about 6 weeks start to offer.
Recruiter phone screen (30 min) Basic stuff. Work authorization, relocation (they really care about this for cleared or clearance-eligible roles), general background. Recruiter was friendly. No technical questions here at all.
Technical phone screen (1 hr) This was with a hiring manager and one SWE from the team. They asked me to walk through a recent project in depth, then two coding questions, both via a shared Google Doc. Not a LeetCode grinder session. First question was array manipulation, roughly medium difficulty if you're used to leetcode. Second was more of a design question about how I'd structure a data pipeline for a real-time system. They wanted to hear my reasoning process more than just the answer.
Onsite (virtual, 4 hrs total) Four separate panel interviews, each 45-60 minutes. Two technical, one behavioral, one with a senior staff engineer that was half system design and half "do you know how government software development works."
Technical rounds: algorithms (graph traversal came up, also some C++ specifics since the team uses it), and one focused on embedded systems concepts. I came from a web background and the embedded stuff caught me off guard.
Behavioral round: very structured STAR format. They asked me about a time I disagreed with a technical decision and how I handled it, working across teams, and a safety/ethics question that I did not expect at all from a software role.
System design: not distributed systems at Google scale. More like: how would you design this avionics data logging system with these constraints. Real-world engineering, fault tolerance, latency vs reliability tradeoffs.
Clearance note: the role I applied for was clearance-eligible, not clearance-required. They said they'd sponsor a Secret clearance. That changes your timeline substantially after the offer.
Overall: much more grounded than big tech loops. Less LeetCode obsession, more actual engineering judgment. Slower process, expect patience.