I've hired at two different big tech companies and now I'm on the other side of the table prepping for a director-level role at Tesla. Done a lot of research and had a few conversations with people currently there. Here's what I've pieced together on their behavioral approach.
Tesla doesn't have a formal published set of leadership principles the way Amazon does. That's actually important: don't go in expecting to map everything to a framework like STAR + LP. They do care about behavioral questions but the philosophy is more "tell me what you actually did" and less "demonstrate a named principle."
The themes that come up repeatedly in Tesla behavioral rounds:
Moving fast under constraints. They want examples where you shipped something despite incomplete information or resources. "Tell me about a time you had to make a decision without having all the data" comes up a lot. They're looking for bias-toward-action over over-planning.
Dealing with ambiguity and changing priorities. Tesla has a reputation for shifting direction fast. They want to see you've operated in that kind of environment and didn't freeze. Frame examples where the spec changed mid-build and you adapted.
Ownership and driving outcomes, not just tasks. Classic SWE behavioral at FAANG wants you to show collaboration. Tesla skews toward: did YOU own it, did YOU drive it to completion. The individual contributor ownership signal is high.
Disagreeing with leadership and still executing. This one is interesting. They ask about times you pushed back on a decision. But they also want to see that once a call was made, you executed without dragging. Both halves matter.
For senior and staff roles they'll also probe on how you scaled your impact through others, but it's less "matrix org influence" and more "how did you pull the team forward."
What I'd avoid: heavily process-heavy answers ("I set up a weekly stakeholder sync and created a RACI"). Tesla culture tends to view that as overhead. Show that you value directness and can move.
They do ask "why Tesla" and they can smell a canned answer. Connect it to something specific: the technical domain, the scale, a product they've shipped. Vague mission-speak lands flat.