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Engineer Interview Experience

April 24, 2013
Neutral ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Someone from HR called to schedule a phone interview. The first interview was pretty straightforward. They asked me a bunch of undergraduate structures questions:

  • Cantilevered beam with a load at the end: where will it fail and why? How would you design the cross-section to allow it to withstand more force?
  • Vertical cantilevered beam with compressive force: where and how will it fail and why? How would you design the cross-section so that it can withstand more force? Given a certain mass, would you choose aluminum or steel?

After that, we mostly talked about the company and the structures group within the company.

HR called back a few days later to schedule a second phone interview, this time with finite element methods in addition to structures. All the technical talk revolved around the question, "How would you model a rocket?" This included talking about boundary conditions in a rocket model, what types of elements would be used, and how you would go about checking the accuracy of someone else's model.

Questions

None. All the questions are fairly straightforward. They take what you're good at and see if you can apply this topic to rockets.

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 41 interview experiences for the SpaceX Engineer role in United States.

Success Rate

22%
Pass Rate

SpaceX's interview process for their Engineer roles in the United States is very selective, failing most engineers who go through it.

Experience Rating

Positive46%
Neutral27%
Negative27%

Candidates reported having good feelings for SpaceX's Engineer interview process in United States.

SpaceX Work Experiences