Taking advantage of my free month of LinkedIn Premium, I sent an InMail to a recruiter at Tesla. He contacted me a day or two later and enthusiastically outlined the different firmware groups, their functions, and the typical hiring process.

We began by scheduling an email firmware exercise. These were basic questions, and I had to reply with my solutions attached within 30 minutes. My resume and my firmware answers piqued the interest of one manager, so the recruiter arranged a phone interview with him a few days later.

The manager called at the appointed time, and we discussed the work I had done at my current company. The interview lasted about 45 minutes, followed by a live coding session via a collaborative browser-based text editor. As luck would have it, we experienced technical issues a few minutes in, and I was permitted to send in a text file, similar to the firmware exercise. Being honest, I quickly completed it and sent it to the recruiter.

The impression from the first interview was quite positive, leading to a second interview a few days later with a senior engineer. We discussed my current employment in greater detail, as well as projects I had completed in school. The recruiter followed up the next day with good news: an almost all-expenses-paid trip to Palo Alto.

The on-site interview consisted of a presentation I had to deliver, followed by a series of one-on-one sessions with five engineers/managers, one of which was over lunch. I gave myself a week to prepare the presentation and brush up on my software engineering skills. I don't present often, so when I queried the audience about time, I was two minutes over the allotted duration and still not finished! It's a good sign if they allow you to continue and finish. Each one-on-one session included a whiteboard coding component, ranging from writing functions to finding errors in code snippets. The difficulty was relatively easy, although a couple of questions gave me trouble; applicants with less embedded-related experience might find it harder.

I left the office feeling pretty good, though I spent the next week dwelling on what was said and left unsaid. Throughout the entire process, the recruiter remained very polite and professional, a welcome change from entries I've read from a year or two ago. He followed up a week after the on-site interview as promised.

What do you know or have you heard about Tesla?