I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Lightyear (Helmond) in Feb 2021
Interview
Applied online where they expect you to fill in your motivation in 100% honesty and detail. The whole online application process takes like 1.5 hours if you indeed need a call. The first time I applied, I didn't pay heed to their questions and got a "Rejection" and 2nd time I applied I filled in everything and got the assignment to complete!
1. Why do you want to work at Lightyear?
2. If given the choice to work on any system in the Lightyear One, which would be your preference? And why?
3. In your entire career what has been your crowning moment? And also your biggest mistake, and why?
4. Why did you become an embedded software engineer and not an astronaut? Why have you decided that Lightyear might be your next step? And why this position in particular?
5. Do you have a Github account, website or portfolio showing your work that you would like to share?
6. Do you have any questions yourself?
After I answered these questions I got an Assignment to complete. I will add the assignment in the questions for you guys to solve.
I completed the assignment and sent it back. I just got a response saying I am not selected for further rounds, without even saying why what or how ?
Typical Start-up culture!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
For the drivetrain of a prototype vehicle you are asked to implement the part that determines the requested torque based on the user input. The user does this by pressing the throttle pedal.
There are multiple options regarding the throttle pedal, but for now the engineers seem to have selected one that produces two analog output signals, which are connected to a microcontroller.
The relation between the analog signals (redundant for safety reasons) and the pedal angle (min = 0 degrees, max = 30 degrees) are as follows:
- `adc1 = 0.5 + 0.1 * angle`
- `adc2 = 1.0 + 0.08 * angle`
Where adc1 and adc2 are voltages and the angle is in degrees. These analog inputs require some basic low pass filtering (moving average).
This pedal angle corresponds to an amount of torque that the motors must provide. This torque is not only dependent on the pedal angle, it’s also dependent on the current speed of the vehicle. The torque for each speed and pedal angle can be found in the graph below.

In case something goes wrong, in our prototype an LED should light up on the dashboard to indicate something is wrong (in a real production vehicle an error message will be shown on the instrument cluster).