Disney Senior+ Lead Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four-Part Onsite With a Code Review and Whiteboard System Design

The Mouse House onsite!

They've started doing in-person onsites now, so the last two interviews were at the Seattle office. I was interviewing for Lead Software Engineer (Frontend).

The second round had four parts total.

The first part was a half-hour chat with a Senior TPM, mainly to get a sense of your working style and see your collaboration style.

The second part was a code review with a Principal Engineer — they showed you some badly written code (I was interviewing for frontend, so it was frontend code) and wanted to see what suggestions you'd give. Mainly they wanted to see how you mentor juniors, then asked what you'd do to help this person if the code had been written by a junior, and after that asked some mentoring experience questions too.

The third and fourth parts were both system design, frontend-focused — the first was a shopping cart, the second was feature flag design. Drew it directly on the whiteboard.

Interviewed last Friday, got an email on Tuesday saying the hiring manager wanted to talk more about my stakeholder management experience.

The interview was pretty easy overall, maybe because it's a lead position so they focus more on mentoring, collaboration, and system design.