There were five stages to get through, and each one went deep into its content. The process included:

• An initial phone screen.
• A technical dive into one of your projects with the Team/Project Lead.
• A 48-hour Tech Test with an assignment requiring problem-solving and optimization.
• An on-site presentation of your assignment solution to the team.
• Two on-site interviews:
  • A 1-hour coding run 1-on-1 with an engineer.
  • A 1-hour behavioral final 1-on-1 interview.

I reached the Tech Test but did not pass. The HR person during the phone screen was much more involved in SpaceX's internal engineering than HR typically is. The technical dive involved tough questioning from the technical lead, who would probe deeply into project details until the limits of my knowledge were reached. The tech test was a hypothetical satellite-user linking problem that required significant thinking, algorithm design, and optimization. Some of the tests were not fully solvable, necessitating optimization as much as possible.

Tech Test

You are given thousands of records of users, satellites, and interfering satellites. These records include their Earth-centric XYZ positions, as well as some linking constraints to satisfy.

Your task is to write an algorithm to link satellites to users. This algorithm must avoid interfering satellites and modulate satellite frequencies to prevent conflicts.

Tests range from 1 user to 100,000 users. For the larger cases, you cannot achieve full connection, so algorithm optimization is necessary.