Finished my SpaceX frontend engineer interview loop last month. This one surprised me because I went in expecting a pretty standard React-heavy frontend loop and got something a bit different.
Recruiter screen: Normal. Walk through your background, why SpaceX, what have you shipped. The recruiter was fast and direct. No pleasantries.
First technical screen: This was a JavaScript fundamentals round more than a React round. Closures, event loop, promises vs async/await, and one question about prototype chains. I haven't been asked about prototype chains in an interview in four years. Not hard, just unexpected. Brush up on core JS concepts, not just framework usage.
Second technical screen: This one was more applied. They gave me a small coding problem related to data visualization, essentially building a charting component from scratch without a library. Not crazy difficult but it tested whether you can think through layout, state, and user interaction without reaching for a package. Canvas API came up briefly.
Onsite (virtual): Three rounds. One was a system design round focused on how I'd build a real-time telemetry dashboard. This is a legitimate systems question, not a frontend toy. They wanted to know about WebSocket vs polling trade-offs, how to handle backpressure when data comes in faster than the UI can render, and how you'd structure state for thousands of concurrent data points.
The second was behavioral, STAR format. The third was a deep dive into a past project -- "walk us through something you built from scratch and made technical decisions on."
My overall impression: They care more about raw engineering depth than React/TS specifics. If you're a "framework developer" who doesn't know what's happening underneath, this will be a rough loop. The telemetry dashboard question is very SpaceX-specific and interesting. Worth thinking about real-time UI patterns before you go in.