u/Limp-Advantage9999

Senior SWE, laid off in March from a bigtech, 5 months of nothing. Two months ago I started running cluely on every round. Offers came back like nothing had changed.

3 loops since I turned it on. 3 offers. Signed the highest base last week, around 285 base, mid-340s y1.

The part I hate to admit is I used to argue against this stuff. Wrote a long rant in a slack channel last year about how real engineers don't need a crutch. That was when I was the one with the job. Reading it back now is humbling.

The actual unlock isn't the overlay surfacing answers. It's that you stop panicking. You walk in knowing that if your brain goes offline for 10 seconds at minute 30, the structure is right there on screen and you can pick the thread back up.

Friction: doesn't help on mental math, doesn't help on the first 5 minutes of system design before it's read the room, and on the rare interviewer paying more attention to your eyes than to your answer you have to dial down how often you glance.

I don't care who downvotes this. I needed the offer and I got the offer.

Edit: getting a lot of dms, will reply when I'm off work.

Went through the full Anduril SWE loop for an L4 embedded role on their autonomous systems team.

Recruiter Screen

30 minutes. Standard stuff but with a twist, they actually asked if I had reservations about working in defense. Not a trap, they want to filter out people who'll have moral crises three months in. I said I was fine with it, we moved on. She also asked about clearance eligibility which is just "are you a US citizen" at this stage.

Technical Phone Screen

One hour, CoderPad. The problem was framed as managing a fleet of drones with task priority queues, so essentially a modified heap problem but with constraints around real-time task reassignment when a drone goes offline. The algorithmic core was maybe LC medium but the follow-ups about scaling and fault tolerance pushed it harder. The interviewer kept asking "what happens when one drone loses signal mid-task" and I had to keep adapting my solution. Less about getting the optimal answer, more about how I handled changing requirements on the fly.

Onsite Day (4 hours)

Coding Round 1: Graph problem. Given a network of sensor nodes that can relay signals to each other within a certain radius, find the minimum set of nodes needed to maintain full coverage if K nodes fail. I went with a modified minimum vertex cover approach and it worked but my initial solution was O(n³) and the interviewer pushed me to optimize. Got it down to O(n² log n) with a priority-based greedy approach. He seemed happy enough.

Coding Round 2: More practical. Parse a telemetry log file with corrupted entries, reconstruct the valid data stream, and flag anomalies. This was more of a real engineering problem than an algorithms puzzle, lots of string processing and edge case handling. I actually enjoyed this one because it felt like something you'd actually do at work instead of an artificial contest problem.

System Design: Design a command and control system for coordinating autonomous drones across a contested network where communication can be jammed or delayed. This was incredible honestly. The interviewer was a staff engineer who clearly works on this stuff daily and he kept injecting realistic failure modes, "what if the satellite link drops for 30 seconds during a critical operation." I talked through eventual consistency models, local decision-making fallbacks, and how to handle conflicting state when communication resumes. Best system design round I've ever done because it was genuinely interesting instead of "design Twitter" for the 50th time.

Behavioral: Why defense tech, a conflict story, and a question about working under time pressure with real consequences. They're clearly screening for people who take the work seriously since their software literally controls weapons systems.

Prep that helped: Neetcode for the algorithmic basics, but honestly the biggest difference was practicing live system design conversations out loud. The Anduril interviewers don't give you 5 minutes of silence to think, they want a back-and-forth conversation the entire time. Definitely read up on their Lattice platform before interviewing, they will ask you about it.

Got the offer. Comp was competitive with mid-level FAANG. AMA if anyone's considering defense tech.

Got the offer. Cluely was on the whole time.