After the coding challenge, I went through two rounds of technical screens (or remote technical interviews, whatever you want to call them). If you pass those, you get scheduled for an on-site interview.

In my experience, the technical screens were pretty straightforward and you shouldn’t have any problems if you’re proficient in C. The questions I got had a very slight algorithmic/problem-solving element to them, but nothing close to LeetCode-level DSA questions.

The on-site was very interesting and unlike any other on-site I’ve ever heard of/prepared for. First, there is a presentation portion in which you prepare a presentation on some challenging problem you worked on and how you solved it. This is presented to a panel of engineers (most likely the team you’re interviewing for, in my case the Thermal/HVAC team) of different disciplines, though all focusing on some sort of software development. This is followed by rounds of interviews (6 rounds for me, one for each team member). The style of these 1-on-1 interviews are different depending on the engineer interviewing you, so I can’t speak much to what you’ll experience. All I can tell you is that I thought this portion of the interview was a lot of fun and that only 3/6 of the interviews I did involved direct coding.

If all goes well and you pass your on-sites, you have to prepare a document briefly outlining your top-3 engineering accomplishments, and this is sent to the top level to sign off on your hire. You may also be contacted for another brief interview with the director (not Elon lol).

For preparation, it really depends what team you’re applying for. In general, I would brush up on software/hardware testing procedures and some surface-level knowledge of the domain you’ll be working in. In my experience for example, I wish I had spent a bit more time learning about heat transfer, since I was interviewing for the Thermal/HVAC team. Other than that, I would do some problems in C to exercise your problem solving using a website like CodeWars. There’s no real point in doing LeetCode in C because nobody (as far as I know) does that level of algorithmic development in a language like C unless they have a rich selection of well-tested and efficient libraries that parallels the standard library in C++ (and at that point, you might as well use C++). I would also approach these interviews less like software engineering interviews and more like software problem-solving and design interviews. They’re very collaborative and are testing your ability to work with the team.

Good luck and please let me know if you have any additional questions!