SpaceX Software Engineer interview questions

I submitted my resume and some work examples through their website. The position I applied to was focused on Python software development in support of the Avionics hardware team. A few days later I was contacted by a recruiter saying there was interest. The first step was take an online C/C++ programming test. Initially I was worried because my background is much more Python-oriented. I should not have worried. The test was stuff that any serious programmer should know. The second step in the process was a technical interview with the software engineer who headed up this particular software team. It's been quite a while since I've done an interview (10+ years), and the "technical" part of this interview caught me a little by surprise. I have done more homework on this topic since then and I think the questions I was asked are probably typical. I fumbled around on a few, the rest I think I gave good answers. When I was uncertain, I made sure to talk through my thought process as I tried to find a solution. Towards the end I got somewhat negative feedback that my work experience might be too "researchy" for the position in question. The third step was a week-long programming challenge assignment. The topic was not at all technical or work related. I basically had to create a simple text console application in Python given a handful of requirements. I spent sooooo much time on this task! It was frankly a lot of fun. On the last day I misjudged my time and I was not able to meet all the requirements. I feel quite strongly that the work I put into that task very clearly shows my Python programming strengths. Given the earlier doubts I think they had about, I think this (small?) error on my part gave them an easy way to tell me "thanks, but no thanks." The recruiter told me that the only feedback he received from the engineer about my programming test was that it was incomplete, with no further details. My application was closed. The entire process took about a month. Many days would go by when I thought I was waiting for them to make the next step happen. When I would get in touch with the recruiter, it would turn he was waiting for info from the engineer, who in turn thought her part was done.

I applied via their website. One of their recruiters responded within a couple of days. Next was a 60-minute online multiple-choice quiz covering the basics of C++, C#, and SQL. It had 14 questions, and these could easily be answered in a small fraction of the total time given. I had plenty of time to double- and triple-check my work. Then was a phone interview with their recruiter, in which he asked about some things on my resume and asked me some more technical questions centering on data structures and algorithms. He wasn't a developer himself, but it seemed like their developers had provided these questions. Then were two more phone interviews, each with a different developer on their staff. These were done with a live collabedit.com session where they asked me to develop various algorithms live while on the phone with them.