Lockheed Martin Behavioral Interview Questions and Answers

Lockheed Martin’s interview is mostly behavioral: a hiring manager or a panel of two to four people asks STAR questions and then probes the technical detail behind your answers. The questions candidates report most are describe a time you faced a technical challenge on a team project, how would you handle two engineers who disagree about the best solution, talk about a time you took a leadership role, your biggest mistake, and your biggest challenge.

At most sites this is the only interview, often an hour long. Reported loops are on the Lockheed Martin interview experience page, and the process, clearance rules and pay are on the Lockheed Martin interview questions hub.

Lockheed Martin’s three core values

Lockheed Martin’s core values are Do What’s Right, Respect Others and Perform with Excellence. The company’s ethics pages describe doing what’s right as holding a higher standard than the law requires, and its Code of Conduct is organized around the three values. Stories about integrity, treating colleagues fairly and doing careful, high-quality work line up with them.

Common Lockheed Martin behavioral questions

1. Tell me about yourself

Sample answer: “I finished my computer engineering degree in May. My senior project was flight software for a small fixed-wing drone in C++ on an STM32 board, where I wrote the sensor fusion loop running at 200 Hz. Last summer I interned at a test lab writing Python scripts to automate data reduction. I applied to this Missiles and Fire Control role because it is embedded C++ on real-time hardware, which is what I want to keep doing.”

2. Describe a time you faced a technical challenge on a team project (Perform with Excellence)

STAR sample: “Situation: Our drone’s attitude estimate drifted after about 90 seconds. Task: I owned the estimator. Action: I logged raw gyro data, found a temperature-dependent bias, and added online bias estimation to the filter. Result: Drift fell from about 8 degrees to under 1 degree over five minutes, and we passed our flight demo.”

3. How would you handle two engineers who disagree about the best solution? (Respect Others)

STAR sample: “Situation: Two teammates disagreed on using an RTOS versus a bare-metal loop. Task: We needed a decision before our design review. Action: I wrote both options against our timing requirements and schedule, and we ran a one-day prototype of the RTOS path. Result: The prototype met timing with margin, the bare-metal advocate agreed, and we documented the decision in our design notes.”

4. Talk about a time you took a leadership role

STAR sample: “Situation: Our six-person team had no integration plan two weeks before demo. Task: Nobody owned integration. Action: I set up a daily 15-minute stand-up, a shared checklist of 30 interface items and a test schedule. Result: We closed every item three days early. I did not have a title; I just took the work nobody had claimed.”

5. What is your biggest mistake? (Do What’s Right)

STAR sample: “Situation: In my internship I reported test results from a script that had a units bug. Task: Correct the record. Action: I found it the next day, told my mentor immediately, re-ran the data and sent a corrected report with a note on what changed. Result: No decision had used the bad data yet. I now add a check that compares outputs to a hand-calculated case.”

6. What is your biggest challenge so far?

Framework: Choose something hard that you finished, not something still unresolved. Show the steps you took and what you would do differently.

7. Tell me about a time you solved a challenging problem and what you would do differently

Sample answer: “A sensor kept dropping I2C messages. I scoped the bus, found rise times too slow for 400 kHz, and changed the pull-up resistors. Looking back, I would have scoped the bus on day one instead of debugging firmware for three days.”

8. Tell me about your experience working on a team

Framework: Give team size, your role, one thing you did that helped others, and the result. Panels look for whether you made other people’s work easier.

9. Tell me about a time you had to follow a process you disagreed with (Do What’s Right)

Sample answer: “Our lab required two-person review for any change to a test procedure, and it slowed us down. I followed it, and once it caught my error in a pressure limit. Later I proposed a checklist that made reviews take 10 minutes instead of a day, and the lead adopted it.”

10. Why Lockheed Martin?

Sample answer: “This posting is on a program where the software runs on hardware that has to work the first time, and I want that level of rigor early in my career. I am a U.S. citizen, I am comfortable with clearance requirements, and the 9/80 schedule and the chance to move between programs are why I picked Lockheed over a commercial software job.”

11. Are you comfortable working on defense programs?

Sample answer: “Yes. I have thought about it, and I want to work on systems that protect the people who use them. I understand the clearance process involves a background investigation and I am ready for it.”

12. Do you have any questions for us?

Strong questions:

• “Which language and toolchain does the team use day to day?”
• “How are new hires assigned to programs, and can they rotate later?”
• “What does a successful first year look like on this team?”

Real examples to prepare before a Lockheed interview

Answers that hurt in a Lockheed interview

• Saying “we” so often the panel cannot tell what you did
• Listing a tool on your resume that you cannot explain in detail
• Hesitating when asked about defense work or a background investigation
• Stories with no result
• Asking about remote work first; most cleared roles are onsite

Quick answers

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