Anduril Engineer via referral: Group Anagrams, Basic Calculator and a drone test data ingestion design on Excalidraw

Applied via a referral. First round was a behavioural chat, spoke about general interest in the company and logistics, some questions about my resume and how I approached certain problems in the past. Used the STAR approach for all these questions and it went fine.

Next round was a technical interview with one of their engineers. Started with questions on CS fundamentals followed by a LC medium question, Group Anagrams. Some of the technical questions they asked me were about building APIs.

Third round was a virtual onsite with 4 parts. The first 2 were LC questions (1 medium and 1 hard, the hard one was to build a basic calculator), next was a behavioural round and then the last was system design. Every round of the whole interview process I was asked "Why Anduril?" and this seemed a super important theme throughout.

The system design question whiteboarding was to design a system that ingests high-frequency drone test data, and to make the collected data available for search and analysis by their engineering teams. The whiteboarding was all done on Excalidraw. The whole interview process felt very well organized and the interviewers were very chill and easy to chat to. They communicated the expectations and evaluation criteria clearly throughout so it was a pretty relaxing process compared to others I've done.