Finished the SpaceX onsite three weeks ago for a mid-senior SWE role. Going remote. Sharing because there's almost no recent info on what the actual day structure looks like.
Setup: All Zoom, scheduled over one day. They block the full day on your calendar but the actual interviews were 5 rounds spread from about 10am to 4pm with two 30-minute breaks. An HR coordinator was the point of contact and kept everything on time, which I appreciated.
The 5 rounds:
Coding round 1 (60 min): Two problems. First was medium, done in 15 minutes. Second was harder, graph-based, took the rest of the time. Got a working solution but not optimized. Interviewer asked me to walk through how I'd improve it if I had another 20 minutes.
Coding round 2 (60 min): More open-ended. Given a partially written file that had a few bugs and a function stub I needed to implement. Closer to real work than LC. I liked this one. Required actually reading code, not just writing it.
System design (60 min): See other posts for details on this format. Mine was a data pipeline design question. Focus on reliability and failure handling more than throughput.
Behavioral (45 min): Ownership, handling constraints, mission connection. Pretty standard but they pushed on follow-up questions.
Hiring manager (30 min): Half background review, half "here's what the team is working on, any questions." More conversational. Felt like a mutual fit check.
The debrief: I got feedback through the recruiter 5 business days after. They're not the fastest but they do communicate. Offer came 2 days after that.
Overall: long day, but well-organized. The interviewers were engaged and technically strong. Not a rubber stamp process.