I actually applied for several positions that felt like a good fit at multiple SpaceX locations: Cape Canaveral, Redmond, and Vandenberg. I didn't have any interest in commuting to Hawthorne every day.

About two weeks later, I got a call from my recruiter. She conducted a quick screening interview for about 30 minutes to get to know me.

After that went well, I was advanced to the next round, which was with my potential supervisor and a colleague. They asked me a lot of "fundamentals of engineering" questions about technical situations I might encounter as part of the job.

I did very well at that phone interview, and with their recommendation, I moved on to a phone interview about a week later with the director of SpaceX operations at Vandenberg. I had a thorough, but very relaxed interview with him.

At this point, SpaceX flew me out to Vandenberg for an on-site interview, which involved giving a 15-minute technical briefing (and fielding a lot of questions from the team), a serious engineering physics test that was timed and scored, and then individual breakout interviews with each of my potential coworkers.

I did very well at the on-site interview and then flew home.

After the entire team gave unanimous approval, I had a phone interview with the VP of all launch-related activities. This was a very relaxed call and went very well.

A few days later, I got a call from my recruiter that I had gotten the job!

It was a very intense interview process, not for the faint of heart, but all the questions were fair and definitely relevant to the day-to-day tasks I now perform.

Just relax, be confident, and "know what you know."

There were several "brain teaser" sort of questions. The one that really stumped me was this: If you have an elephant and need to weigh it, but do not have access to any kind of a scale, sensor, or balance beam, how do you do it?