Went through the SpaceX EM loop last quarter. Background: 15 years in eng, managed teams from 4 to 22 engineers across two FAANG companies. I thought I knew what an EM interview looked like. SpaceX had different priorities.
What surprised me:
They really, truly do not want you to sound like a big-company manager. The first signal they're looking for is speed. Not "how do you handle competing priorities" speed, but actual "how fast do you move" speed. They'll probe with questions like "tell me about a time you shipped something in a week that should have taken a month" and they mean it literally. They want to feel urgency.
The technical round: Yes, EMs interview technically at SpaceX. Not LeetCode, but I had a systems design round that was real. They want to know that if something breaks at 2am and your team is asleep, you could get on the terminal and debug it yourself. I walked through a distributed messaging architecture problem. It went fine but it would have gone badly if I hadn't stayed technical.
The people management questions: Not as fluffy as FAANG. Instead of "describe your leadership style" they asked things like "tell me about a time you had to cut someone from your team" and "tell me about a hire that didn't work out." Very direct. Trying to find managers who have actually had hard conversations, not just facilitated retros.
The mission question: Every single interviewer asked some version of "why SpaceX." Not as a courtesy, as a filter. You need a real answer. "Rockets are cool" doesn't cut it. "I believe in the mission to make humanity multi-planetary and I'm at a career stage where I want to bet on something with a decade of runway" is more like it.
The loop itself was 5 rounds: technical, two behavioral panels, a cross-functional interview with a PM, and a final with a senior director. Timeline was about 3.5 weeks.
I got an offer. Negotiated slightly on base. Total package was reasonable but not FAANG-level. Took it anyway.