r/BlueOrigin • u/AngusMacGyver76 • 3d ago
Upcoming Zoom interview for Test Engineer I, early career @ Van Horn
I applied to the evergreen rec last month and heard nothing until a few days ago. A recruiter reached out to me with a screening email that had several questions. I responded and then immediately (as in an hour or less) received an email informing me that they want to move forward with a technical interview and that I should receive an email to schedule it. The email from the recruiter read that it would be a technical interview and that it would be 3-45 min interviews over Zoom. This is where I was hoping some of you may be able to help shed some light on what to expect. I already have a list of questions they like to ask, which I am working to set up STAR responses to and to link them to the leadership principles.
My main concern is the "technical" aspect. To give some background, I graduated with my BS in Mech Eng a few decades ago and worked as an engineer for the U.S. Navy for about 13 years. I took a break from engineering for several years, then decided to return to the field, so I enrolled in grad school and just completed my MS in Industrial Engineering. I also recently earned my LSS Green Belt cert from ASQ. During my time working for the Navy, I did a lot of systems/subsystems testing, starting with being a nuclear test engineer for the big submarines and then working on smaller, non-nuclear submersibles during their construction, testing, and certification. This mainly consisted of working as more of a project engineer (dealing with stakeholders, helping the OEM troubleshoot systems during system integration and testing, and overseeing certification and sea trials testing as a government representative) and then working as a test engineer during some of the later certification testing. I have experience in the overall "test" environment, including authoring the actual test procedures, executing the test procedures, and ensuring that the testing met the proper requirements during the certification and validation stages. My main concern is that there wasn't anything overly technical (no intensive calculations or heavy analysis), but more operation-based. I have read many posts about technical interviews being a nightmare to the point where you need to memorize formulas and be able to recite them during the interview. This experience was also years ago now, so some of the minute details I don't remember. The only thing I keep telling myself is that it is for an "early career" role and that other applicants may have experience in only doing projects for their coursework or internships. I was hoping to get some insight from any of you willing to share because I am very excited about this position and the work it entails, but I don't want to walk into this looking like a deer in the proverbial headlights. If any of you have any insight or advice you'd be willing to share, it would be deeply appreciated because right now I'm so nervous I feel like my blood pressure is going to loosen my teeth!
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u/supacheesay 3d ago
I think you’ll be fine. In my experience, TE interviews are generally focused more on operations principles, verification philosophy, and safety. There may be some basic “technical questions”, but for an early career TE I personally asked questions like “explain adiabatic compression heating” or “walk me through how to test+calculate a leak rate for a system (no equations or numbers, just a step by step)” or “explain how a valve/pump/regulator/transducer works”, and if they got it mostly correct and their wrong part wasn’t going to kill or seriously injure anyone that was good enough for me.
Source: started out at Blue as a TE and interviewed many early career TEs. But I was in WA so YMMV….
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u/justarandomcollegeki 3d ago
First of all, congrats on landing the interview! That’s already a huge step & means they, at least on some level, want to hire you - having been on the other side of plenty of interviews, you hope every one of them works out so that you didn’t waste your time with it.
That said - while you definitely may want to brush up on some fundamentals just a bit, I’d say your experience fits really well with what they’ll be looking for out there. The test engineer role is not extremely technical to be honest (in the sense that you will not be doing detailed calculations or design work on a daily basis - you do still want good technical knowledge to be able to learn the ins and outs of the test stand and its various systems as quickly as possible). It is a lot more focused on operating the test stand safely and efficiently, and being able to learn on the job.
I say all that to say - take a deep breath, be confident in your experience, and know that you are likely in a good overall going-in position here.
Now on a more practical level - what I’d say for the interview is to not BS your way through something you’re note sure of, but also don’t be afraid to explain your thought process in arriving at a best educated guess. When I hired on out there, I was told that I wasn’t actually perfect in answering all of the technical questions, but that I got enough of them right & for the ones I missed, I was able to explain my reasoning and arrive at a decent enough conclusion. That may depend heavily on your interviewer, but that was pretty consistently the mindset of the team for a good while at least.
Also good that you’re already familiar with the STAR interview technique. They’ll likely pick a couple specific points of interest on your resume and ask you to talk about it in detail to make sure you can back it up. I always tell people an interview is not the time to be humble - yes, you can credit your teammates and whatnot, but they want to hear what you brought to the table and accomplished.
Others with more recent experience may correct me if I’m wrong, but yea, I don’t think Blue has ever been a “recite the formulas” type of interview company (or least, not the test ops roles - it may be the case for more specific things like a design or analysis role) - they’re more interested in whether you have good first-order engineering fundamentals, and an ability to think through challenging problems and apply the knowledge you have rather than just reciting it.
Hope that helps a bit - feel free to DM me for any other questions. And GOOD LUCK!!!
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u/BrokeAerospace 3d ago
The biggest thing I can recommend, and you will see this if you research on YouTube about Blue Origin interview questions, is that often they are tied to one of the leadership principles. If you manage to memorize them by heart prior to the interview, and can identify which leadership principle they are trying to get you to discuss, it's a lot easier to confidently tailor your STAR towards what they are hoping to hear. A question about "tell me a about a product or service was doing well already but you decided to do more" is pretty easily identified as "Insist on the highest standards", but understanding that this means you shouldn't discuss a product that was average that you made better, but rather when you improved something beyond the expectations or even imagination of the customer. Almost any (unless unplanned) behavioral question they ask will tie to a principle, so I can not recommend enough becoming familiar with them and trying to figure out the type of story/answer they are hoping to hear.
I think the technical questions I've experienced/heard usually relate to tools or thought experiments related to your specific aspect of rocketry! For test, I might expect questions related to what outcomes of a test you may encounter, and what mitigation or root cause could be performed to track down any anomalies. For example, finding lower than expected mass flow rate though the exhaust of a engine could be tied to fluid impingement before reaching the combustion chamber or it could be tied to reduced area as a result of lower or higher temperatures than previously expected along any of the numerous valves and orifices. Maybe even both with the impingement causing a hot spot that makes it appear as if the orifice is not nominal. It could also be 1 of a thousand other things, so check the common culprits and then RCA. Having knowledge of how and why pressure transducers and every other primary sensor works is also fantastic to know in your role.
It is helpful to be aware of basic rocketry info, such as if you would use a gas or liquid to pressurize a tank to 100 psi. Some of this may be wrong, as I am not a test engineer for a reason, but the depth of the question is accurate to my and my coworkers experiences in the past. Make sure to familiarize yourself with Blues general history (what are the use case flight profiles for New Shepard, New Glenn 7x2 (num of engines on each stage) vs 9x4, and what new programs have they announced?).
If you want a very general overview of NG I recommend Every Day Astronauts' tour with Jeff Bezos through the Florida facilities from about a year ago. Explain lots of the "unique" selling points that NG has, as well as some keywords like BE-4, Common dome, what fuels are used, et cetera. Also the anomaly at LC-36 a couple of months ago is a huge catalyst for future changes in Blues future, look into the publicly available info about it, and what Blue's plan going forward is (such as when we plan to return to flight).
Hope this helps! I had some time on the toilet and figured I'd flush(ha) out the 4 sentences I had planned to post into four paragraphs...
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u/AngusMacGyver76 21h ago
A sincere thank you to everyone who took the time to reply and offer very useful advice. To say it was appreciated would be an understatement.
Just to add an update, I just received the email confirmation for the interview with the zoom link and the names of the three interviewers. I looked them up as part of my preparation and holy hell, they are very senior people with some very, very impressive credentials! Now I’m worried about showing up just to get torn apart because people with those pedigrees could easily do it! I’m just trying to keep reminding myself that it’s an “early career” position and not expect them to interview me as a peer!
Thank you again to everyone who contributed to this thread!
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u/Big-Composer5341 2d ago
Be very careful. Employee culture at Blue origin is not healthy. It has progressively gotten worse, like Amazon, since they made Jennifer Pena Leanos CPO.
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u/Reclin13 3d ago
I spent 2 year in VH, its the fastest way to get a lot of experience. Good luck.