Updated by Anduril candidates
Software Engineer (New Grad) Interview Experience
The weirdest round was a HackerRank about arranging two football teams for a photo, and the interviewer basically admitted it was confusing on purpose. I left thinking I had definitely failed it, then still got pushed to finals.
Interview process
I went straight to a recruiter screen with no OA, then did a 60-minute engineer phone screen, and after that the final was three separate 60-minute rounds. The biggest theme was ambiguity: the phone screen HackerRank was intentionally confusing, the other technicals kept expanding the problem, and I had to ask a lot of clarifying questions instead of expecting a neat prompt. The behavioral with a senior leader was also tougher than usual because he went deep on every line of my resume and kept circling back to why Anduril and why defense. The turnaround was fast and I usually heard back the next day, and I honestly thought I had failed the phone screen but still got moved forward. I ended up not getting the offer, but the process made it pretty clear they care about fundamentals, clean code, and whether you actually align with what the company does.
- Recruiter screen
- Technical interview
- Final round
Interview tips
I'd still do a lot of LeetCode, especially tagged questions, but I wouldn't only prep the usual array and graph stuff. I'd also review really basic design questions like linked lists, queues, and deques, because I got caught off guard by how fundamental one of the finals was. Know your resume inside out, because the behavioral can get into return offers, manager feedback, and what you actually did, not just canned 'tell me about a time' stories. And go in expecting weird open-ended prompts, so ask clarifying questions early and don't assume the question is clean on purpose.
Company culture
I got the sense they hire pretty fast, and even as a bigger company they were moving with next-day turnaround a lot of the time. For new grad, the loop felt fundamentals-first because team matching happens later, so they weren't testing some super specific domain skill upfront. The engineers seemed to like ambiguity and wanted me to ask questions instead of just jumping into code, and a lot of them seemed very C++-heavy even though I did my interview in Python. They also kept coming back to why Anduril and why this industry without saying 'defense' super directly, so mission and values fit are definitely part of the bar, not just technical skill.
Questions asked
Overview
The behavioral final was with a very senior leader, and it felt more like getting grilled on my actual track record and motivations than doing canned STAR answers.
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
Walk me through your resume.
Which past role did you like the most?
Did you get a return offer?
How would you rate your performance there?
What would your manager say about you?
He basically went line by line through my resume and pushed a lot harder than most behavioral interviewers do. I answered which experience I liked most, whether I got return offers, how I thought I performed, and what my manager would probably say about me. It didn't feel like standard behavioral prep really mapped to it. It felt like he was trying to figure out if I could back up every line on my resume and what I was actually like to work with.
What about your previous experience makes Anduril the right next step?
This one felt like an actual conversation, not just a checkbox. I talked about the scale and impact of the problems and why the company's growth interested me, but he kept pulling on it in a way that felt like he was testing whether I genuinely wanted to work in defense. As a new grad, that was honestly hard, because they're really probing for values alignment, not just a polished company answer.
Which of my teams or areas sounds most aligned with your background?
I talked through the kinds of teams that matched what I'd done before and what I wanted to work on next. It almost felt like early team matching. After that, he spent a lot of time telling me about his org, how the company had grown, and why he'd stayed so long, which made the round feel very fit-oriented and pretty personal.
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