heading into a software engineer interview at SpaceX in about 3 weeks, infrastructure-adjacent team from what the recruiter told me. I've been doing the standard leetcode prep but I'm trying to get a clearer picture of what the actual rounds look like right now.
a few specific things I'm trying to figure out: how heavy is the system design component vs. coding? do they do any domain-specific stuff for infra roles or is it pretty generic? and is the behavioral round one session or spread across multiple?
if you've been through any version of the SpaceX software loop in the last 6 months, would really appreciate hearing what you hit. round count, topics, rough difficulty, anything that's more specific than what's on glassdoor.
4 replies
infra_ines
went through an infra loop there about 4 months ago. for that team: two coding rounds (LC medium, one had a graph problem), one system design that was pretty open-ended around distributed systems (I got something like 'design a fault-tolerant telemetry pipeline, what are the tradeoffs'), and one behavioral with the hiring manager. behavioral was 45 min and he had a printed list of questions, which was a bit formal, but the questions were actually good. all about past decisions under pressure.
de_derek
telemetry pipeline is very on-brand. good to know the system design is open-ended rather than a specific SpaceX thing. did they ask about CAP theorem or more practical tradeoff stuff?
infra_ines
more practical. they want to see you reason through latency vs. durability tradeoffs in real terms. I mentioned CAP briefly to frame something but the interesting part for them was how I'd handle the loss of a ground station mid-stream. stay concrete.
sre_sol
the behavioral stuff really is distributed across multiple sessions at SpaceX from what I've seen. even the coding rounds have a 'why did you approach it that way' component. it's not a separate behavioral block, it's woven in.