Want a Job at SpaceX? Human Resources Has Some Tips
The company SpaceX has a certain mystique: a founder who builds electric cars; rockets that self-land; a privately-funded spacecraft that became the first to supply the International Space Station. Soon, astronauts will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Dragon spaceships as well.
Wouldn’t it be a dream come true to work there? Get in line.
The internship program alone had enough applications to fill a stadium last year — that’s 39,000 people. Luckily for the applicants, HR manager Brian Bjelde (also SpaceX employee No. 14) recently took to Reddit to give his tips for getting into the company and helping it get to Mars someday.
“We know that in rocket engineering, there are millions of ways for a rocket to fail and only one way for it to work right. We’re looking for great people who will help us to try, fail, try again, and ultimately succeed,” he Bjelde wrote.
“One of the key enablers of getting to Mars is producing super safe and reliable rockets and with that in mind we’ve created some hard core engineering departments with specific focus on ensuring we’ve designed in reliability, that we produced hardware reliably and repeatably, and that we’ve considered all the system impacts that can affect reliability of the mission.”
In various answers to the “ask me anything” session, Bjelde said the company doesn’t just rely on GPA for aspiring applicants. They’re also looking for talent and problem-solving, and they even pull from pools such as military veterans. And while the hours at SpaceX are long, he said they aren’t usually 80 or 100 hours a week as some people say. Turnover rates “are below average for the industry”, he said.
“My best advice is to find your passion, acquire as much hands-on experience, and effectively present that in your application,” he said. “We believe great talent can be found anywhere and are scouring the universe to try and find it. In many cases it is not as simple as finding graduates from top engineering schools. We’ve discovered great talent from all kinds of interesting places … even meeting someone at a laundromat.”
He said there are a few things that make SpaceX stand out. Its employees think about the mission of humanity to “become a multi-planetary species” as well as focusing on the nuts and bolts of individual missions. The organization works mostly outside of hierarchies, in recognition that sometimes the best solution comes from more junior people. Moreover, SpaceX takes “the hardest shots”, sets “aggressive goals” and avoids “analysis paralysis” when it comes to figuring out what to do.
Bjelde also recalled some of the moments he’s had at SpaceX, such as when the first rocket landed safely after bringing a mission successfully to space. “I cried like a baby when it landed … I still get goosebumps recalling the moment,” he said.
But not all of it was rosy. Bjelde also has a scrap of an early Falcon 1 that failed after launch. “Every failure hurts, but this felt personal since Falcon 1 was everything to me. Bittersweet as the successes today are built on the shoulders of lessons learned from those early failures.”
If you’re still eager to join SpaceX’s “road to the Red Planet”, you can check out career and internship opportunities on this page.
