# Vast Interview Guide (2026): Cracking the Haven-1 Space Station Team

Source: https://www.techinterview.org/companies/vast-interview-guide/
Updated: 2026-08-23 · techinterview.org

**TL;DR —** Vast is the Long Beach, California aerospace company racing to fly Haven-1, meant to be the first commercial space station, after already flying an uncrewed Haven Demo module in 2025. Interviews run through a recruiter screen, a technical phone or Zoom round with the hiring team, and an onsite at Long Beach that mixes a project deep-dive, fundamentals questions, and several back-to-back 1-on-1s. Expect real engineering rigor rather than trivia: safety-critical software design, embedded and real-time constraints, and questions about how you'd build something that has to work correctly the first time in orbit. Comp leans on equity in a fast-growing private company, so check levels.fyi and Glassdoor for current numbers rather than trusting any single figure.Vast was founded in 2021 by Jed McCaleb, who previously built Ripple and Stellar, and has been funded largely out of his own pocket alongside outside investors. The company's goal is to build and operate commercial space stations, starting with Haven-1, a single-module station designed to host crews of up to four for short stays, followed by a larger Haven-2 intended to pick up work as the International Space Station winds down. Vast already flew an uncrewed prototype, Haven Demo, in 2025, which the company says makes it the only commercial space station developer to have actually flown and operated its own spacecraft. Haven-1 itself has slipped from an original 2026 target toward 2027, which is normal for hardware on this timeline, but the company is hiring aggressively across software, mechanical and aerospace engineering, avionics, and manufacturing to keep the program moving.

Vast has raised more than a billion dollars in combined equity and debt financing, with backers including Balerion Space Ventures, IQT, the Qatar Investment Authority, Mitsui, MUFG, Nikon, and Space Capital, on top of McCaleb's own investment. With more than a thousand people at the Long Beach headquarters and satellite sites in Hawthorne and Mojave, the org spans everything from structural and propulsion engineering to the flight software and crew-facing apps that will run inside Haven-1. If you're applying to a software role, you could land anywhere from ground systems and mission operations tooling to embedded flight code to a native iOS app for astronauts.

## Process
Vast's loop generally starts with a recruiter phone screen to confirm background, motivation, and logistics, followed by a technical phone or video interview with someone from the actual team you'd join. That first technical round tends to center on your most substantial past project: expect to walk through the architecture, the hard tradeoffs, and what broke, then answer a handful of fundamentals questions to confirm you understand what you built rather than just describing it. Candidates who clear that stage are invited onsite to Long Beach for a half-day (sometimes longer) loop that mixes a presentation of your work with a series of 1-on-1 interviews across the team, plus a tour of the facility. For some roles, especially more senior or cross-functional ones, candidates report longer panel-style sessions with multiple interviewers in the room at once. Coding rounds for software roles draw on the kind of pattern-based problems covered in an [algorithm patterns cheat sheet](/algorithm-patterns-cheat-sheet/), though the emphasis is less on obscure tricks and more on writing correct, defensible code under time pressure. Expect at least one [system design](/category/system-design/) conversation if you're interviewing for backend, ground systems, or infrastructure work, and a behavioral round that digs into ownership and how you operate under ambiguity — prepping with a [behavioral interview framework like STAR](/post/3233460379/behavioral-interview-questions-2026-star-method-amazon-leadership-principles-and-winning-answers/) is worth the hour it takes. Reported timelines run about three to four weeks end to end, though it can move faster for teams under pressure to hire ahead of a hardware milestone.

## What they actually ask
- Walk through the most technically demanding project you've shipped, including what you'd change if you rebuilt it today.
- Design or debug a system that has to keep working when a sensor, network link, or subsystem fails partway through — how do you detect it and degrade gracefully instead of crashing.
- Coding questions on data structures and algorithms, evaluated on correctness and clarity more than speed.
- Questions specific to safety-critical and fault-tolerant software: how you'd structure fault detection, redundancy, and fail-safe states in code that controls hardware.
- For flight and avionics software roles: experience with real-time constraints, resource-limited embedded targets, and integrating software with hardware interfaces like sensors, actuators, or bus protocols.
- For ground systems or DevOps-adjacent roles: building CI/CD pipelines for safety-relevant code, and how testing and release gates differ when a bug can't just be hotfixed after launch.
- For the crew-facing software team: building native applications (Swift/iOS has come up for crew interface work) that have to stay usable and reliable in a closed environment with no easy tech support.
- System design questions around telemetry, mission operations tooling, or data pipelines that move information between spacecraft and ground.
- Basic orbital mechanics or spacecraft systems literacy for roles that touch guidance, navigation, or operations, even if you're not doing the astrodynamics math yourself.
- Behavioral questions about working with hardware teams, dealing with schedule pressure on a program with a hard external deadline, and taking ownership of a problem outside your immediate area.

## Levels and comp (2026)
Vast is private, so there's no public leveling document, but job postings and employee reports point to a fairly standard engineering ladder running from new-grad and associate engineer up through senior, staff, and principal, with a separate management track above that. Titles you'll see posted include things like Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Staff Software Engineer, and Principal Flight Software Engineer, with the more senior titles concentrated on flight and avionics software where fault tolerance and safety-critical design experience matter most. Self-reported data on levels.fyi shows Vast software engineer total compensation clustering in the low-to-mid six figures, with a wide spread depending on level, and hardware and flight software roles trending higher — but the sample size for a company this size is small, so treat any specific figure as a rough signal rather than a guarantee. Compensation packages combine base salary, equity, and standard benefits; because Vast is still private, equity value depends heavily on future funding rounds and eventual outcomes, so ask directly about vesting schedule, refresh grants, and how the company thinks about equity value at your level. Check levels.fyi and Glassdoor for the most current self-reported numbers before you negotiate, and don't anchor to any single data point.

## Prep priorities
Get comfortable with the concerns that show up in real-time and embedded systems: latency, resource constraints, deterministic behavior, and what happens when a component fails mid-operation. Aerospace software interviews reward candidates who can talk concretely about fault tolerance and redundancy — practice explaining how you'd design a system to detect a failure, isolate it, and fall back to a safe state rather than just handling the happy path. Brush up on general coding fundamentals since a phone screen and at least part of the onsite will test data structures and algorithms directly; the patterns you'd study for any strong engineering interview still apply here. If you're going for a flight software or avionics role, review C++ memory and concurrency behavior, embedded Linux basics, and how software interfaces with hardware over common protocols. For ground systems, DevOps, or backend roles, be ready to design a pipeline that handles telemetry or mission data reliably, including how you'd test and roll out changes to code that can't be casually redeployed once a spacecraft is on orbit. A working knowledge of orbital mechanics basics — orbits, rendezvous, ground station passes — won't be tested in depth for most software roles, but knowing the vocabulary helps you follow what your interviewers are describing. Finally, prepare specific stories about working across a hardware/software boundary and about a time schedule pressure forced you to make a tradeoff, since that maps directly onto how the company describes its day-to-day.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Is Vast (the space station company) the same as VAST Data?
No. Vast, based in Long Beach and building Haven-1, is a separate company from VAST Data, an enterprise data storage company. Glassdoor and other review sites list them separately, but it's easy to search the wrong one by accident, so double-check the company page and location before reading reviews or comp data.

### Does Vast ask LeetCode-style coding questions?
Yes, for software roles expect a real coding round testing data structures and algorithms, usually as part of the phone screen or onsite. It's paired with deeper technical conversation about your past projects and, for flight or avionics roles, fault-tolerant and embedded systems design.

### How long does the Vast interview process take?
Candidate reports put the average around three to four weeks from first contact to offer, spanning a recruiter screen, a technical phone or video round, and an onsite. Timelines can compress when a team is hiring urgently against a hardware milestone.

### Do I need aerospace experience to get hired at Vast?
Not necessarily for most software roles. Strong fundamentals in real-time or embedded systems, distributed systems, or reliable backend engineering transfer well, and the company has hired engineers from outside traditional aerospace. What matters more is being able to reason clearly about failure modes and safety-critical design under questioning.

### What's the onsite interview actually like?
Most candidates describe a half-day (or longer) visit to the Long Beach facility that includes a presentation or walkthrough of your background and work, several 1-on-1 interviews with different team members, and a facility tour. Some roles involve a longer panel-style session with multiple interviewers present at once, so ask your recruiter what format to expect for your specific role.