Anduril interview, and the question that comes before the code.

The published accounts agree on the software shape and disagree on the details, and they say so themselves: one recent guide states plainly that candidate experiences do not support a single universal Anduril sequence or timeline. One account has two engineers on the coding screen, another has one; one final round has four sessions, another three. What more than one account reports is below. Timing is the predictable part: candidates describe hearing back the day after each round, first contact to offer in three to four weeks for an uncleared role, an average of 28 days from recruiter screen to offer, and six to eight weeks where a clearance is involved.

Anduril says what it screens for more openly than most, because the mission question is a filter rather than a formality and the coding format is built to expose one habit.

• A considered reason to work in defence. The question is asked twice, by a recruiter and by a senior leader, and growth narratives alone are named as insufficient
• Clarifying before solving. The screen prompts are underspecified on purpose, and asking what the problem actually is counts as part of the answer
• Adapting when the constraints change. Every coding round shifts the problem mid-way, and candidates who defend their first solution rather than reshape it stall
• Ownership and speed under real constraints. The behavioural round goes at what you personally decided, what went wrong and what you did about it
• Depth in a domain over breadth, and genuine product knowledge: candidates who can name Lattice, Ghost, Altius or Roadrunner and say why that one do better than generalists

Behavioural ground is concentrated in the recruiter screen and the last hour with a senior leader, and it is narrower than at most companies: the mission, your CV in depth, and how you decide. The technical prompts below are the ones candidates report by name; AI tools are prohibited in the interviews.

Levels.fyi for software engineers at Anduril in the United States, read on 11 September 2026. The overall median package is $247K and reported packages run from $227K at IC2 to $517K at IC7. IC4, Senior Software Engineer, has a median of $321K made up of roughly $207K base, $111K a year in stock and a small bonus; IC5, Lead, is $380K with $223K base and $153K in stock. Levels.fyi labels the same ladder L3 to L7 on some of its pages and IC2 to IC7 on others, with different medians, so treat the figures as an order of magnitude. Stock is options plus RSUs on a four-year schedule, a quarter after the first year and monthly after that, and Anduril is private, so the stock half is priced by its last funding round rather than by a market. Hardware and mission roles are on their own scales and are not covered here.

1. 01Decide what you think about defence work before the first call, and be able to say which product and why. The question is asked by the recruiter and again by a senior leader, and a growth story on its own is reported as the answer that does not survive the second time.
2. 02Check your eligibility before you apply. Roles are limited to US citizens and lawful permanent residents under export controls, about half need a clearance at Secret or above, and sponsorship is not offered. A cleared role adds weeks and an interim period after the offer.
3. 03Rehearse the multi-phase format rather than single problems. Take a LeetCode medium, solve the simple version, then add a constraint yourself and rework it aloud; the rounds grade how you adapt when the problem changes, and defending the first version is the reported way to stall.
4. 04Ask what the problem is before you solve it. Screen prompts are underspecified on purpose, one candidate was told so by the interviewer, and the clarifying questions are part of the score.
5. 05Write the classes. The design round expects working code for a data structure or component, with edge cases handled and a refactor accepted mid-way, so practise implementing a doubly linked list or an LRU cache cleanly from nothing.
6. 06For senior roles, prepare one design in the company's own domain: a fleet of drones in the field, the signal each one sends, the instructions that go back, and where latency, encoding and encryption sit. Web-scale designs still appear, but the domain one is what separates levels.
7. 07Know your CV to the number. The last hour is a project-by-project walk with a senior leader who asks about scale, the hardest challenge, a conflict and your own rating of your performance, and vague answers are what that round exists to catch.
8. 08For hardware roles, prepare a technical presentation of one project you owned, from design through test to what failed, because the onsite is built around it and around five or six people asking about it afterwards.

This guide covers Anduril's software loop in depth, with the hardware and mission tracks described where the accounts allow. The eligibility rules apply to every role because the work is export-controlled. For management and leadership roles the loop is similar but the bar shifts to people, delivery and strategy, so pair it with the leadership interview prep hub. The bar for your exact role comes from the role-by-role guides, and the prep that actually transfers is spoken, so run a mock interview before the real one.

• 01Exponent, Anduril software engineer interview guidethe six sessions in three stages, the 60-minute HackerRank screen in phases, the two coding sessions with layered constraints, the OOD round, the behavioural round with a senior leader, the citizenship restriction to US citizens and permanent residents, and the domain areas the recruiter asks about.
• 02Exponent, a new-grad candidate's Anduril loopthe recruiter question about perception, backend infra, ML infra or ML; the photo-arrangement screen the interviewer said was confusing on purpose; the shortest-distance problem growing obstacles; the doubly linked list design; replies the next day.
• 03TechPrep, Anduril's interview process 2026the three to four week timeline, the 30 to 60 minute recruiter screen on motivation for defence, the deliberately ambiguous screen prompt, the four-round final day, the graph and geometry topics, that Anduril expects classes and interfaces to be written, and the resume walkthrough with senior leadership.
• 04interviewing.io, Anduril interview process and questionsthe recruiter call, the technical or hiring-manager hour, the four-hour onsite of two coding, one design and one behavioural; the practical LeetCode-medium level; the robots, drones and graph examples; Tinyurl and Tetris; the drones-in-the-field design for L5 and L6; and that AI use is prohibited.
• 05Blind, Anduril interview threadthe intro call confirming mission alignment, citizenship and clearance eligibility; a coding screen with two engineers at easy-to-medium difficulty; a final loop of two technical and two behavioural interviewers; a domain-heavy embedded loop in the drone division; and that the process is division specific.
• 06ClearedJobs, Anduril careers and how to get hiredthat roughly half of open requisitions require a clearance at Secret or above with a meaningful share at TS/SCI, the 600 to 900 active requisitions, the growth from about 4,490 to about 8,200 employees through 2025, the 28-day average from recruiter screen to offer, six to eight weeks for cleared roles, and the three to nine months of interim Secret status after a conditional offer.
• 07Snubber, Anduril interview questions and process 2026that recent candidate experiences do not support one universal sequence or timeline; the technical project presentation for some engineering roles; the hardware topic areas by discipline; and the screening for mission alignment, first-principles judgment, speed and product knowledge of Lattice, Ghost, Altius and Roadrunner.
• 08NoraHQ, Anduril electrical engineer interview guide 2026the three to five rounds over two to four weeks for electrical engineers, their lengths, and the fundamentals asked: buck converters, RC transients, decoupling capacitors and PCB trace effects.
• 09Glassdoor, Anduril engineer interview experiencesthe hardware sequence of a recruiter call, two chief engineer conversations, and an onsite with a presentation and five or six individual interviews; a difficulty rating of 2.8 out of 5; and an average of 23 days to hire for engineer applicants.
• 10Levels.fyi, Anduril Industries Software Engineer, United Statesthe $247K median, the $227K to $517K range from IC2 to IC7, the IC4 and IC5 bands with base and stock, and the four-year options-plus-RSU vesting schedule. Read 11 September 2026.

Interview processes change. This reflects widely-reported and sourced conditions as of 2026 — confirm specifics with your recruiter, and treat it as a map rather than a guarantee.