SpaceX Starlink Backend Engineer Full-Time Four-Hour Assessment

Role: Starlink Backend Software Engineer
Result: No offer
Report time: March 2024
Assessment duration: Four hours

Online assessment

The assessment asked the candidate to assign satellite beams to users represented by three-dimensional vectors around a spherical Earth centered at (0, 0, 0).

The reported contract included these requirements:

1. Return one-to-one user-to-satellite connections.
2. Assign one of four frequencies to every selected beam.
3. A satellite must be within 45 degrees of a user's outward vertical direction.
4. One satellite may serve at most 32 users.
5. Two users served by the same satellite and separated by less than 10 degrees may not use the same frequency.
6. Each evaluation case requires a minimum number of users to be served.

The candidate reported six evaluated cases. Coverage, a 60-second runtime limit, and coding style were part of the evaluation.

The corresponding FastPrep exercise is Starlink Beam Planner.