Went through the Anduril frontend engineer interview process last month for a mid-senior role. Didn't get the offer but learned a lot about what they're looking for, which I think is different from how most frontend interviews go.
I came in expecting the usual: React component design, performance optimization, accessibility, maybe some CSS specificity gotchas. Some of that was there. But the sessions that clearly mattered most were the ones that pushed into territory I'd call product systems design more than pure frontend craft.
What the rounds actually covered:
Coding round 1: React-focused. Implement a data visualization component from scratch. State management, efficient re-renders, correct use of refs for animation. This felt normal. They cared about clean code, not just working code.
Coding round 2: this one caught me. They gave me a real-time data feed scenario (think: sensor data updating fast, needs to render in a dashboard with smooth UX) and asked me to design the update cycle. How do you throttle or debuffer the incoming stream. How do you avoid layout thrashing. How do you handle the case where the UI is frozen and the buffer is filling up. I did okay but I could tell they were disappointed I didn't immediately reach for a web worker.
System design (yes, for frontend): design a dashboard that displays live telemetry from multiple systems simultaneously. Interviewers pushed on: how the client subscribes and unsubscribes efficiently, how you handle reconnection logic for WebSockets, how you persist user layout preferences across sessions without a round trip on every load. This was a 60-minute round and it moved fast.
Behavioral: standard in format but they asked specifically about times I'd pushed back on a PM or designer because I knew the technical constraints made a feature infeasible. They want engineers who will say no with a good reason, not just build what's thrown at them.
The honest read: Anduril frontend isn't really UI craftsperson work the way agency or consumer-product frontend is. It's closer to systems engineering with a rendering layer. If you love performance-critical real-time interfaces, it fits well. If you mainly care about polished design systems and accessibility tooling, you'll probably feel misaligned.
Pay was competitive, equity meaningful. Full-time in Costa Mesa; they were not open to remote for this role.