Just wrapped my Disney frontend engineer interview for a role on the Disney+ web platform team. Wanted to write this up while it's still fresh because I couldn't find much detail online.
Total process was about 5 weeks from recruiter screen to offer. Here's the breakdown:
Recruiter screen (30 min): Pretty standard. They asked about my background, whether I had experience with large-scale React apps, and what I knew about Disney's streaming products. No surprises.
Technical phone screen (60 min): One interviewer, shared Coderpad. Two coding problems. First was a DOM manipulation question, basically build a custom tooltip component without React (vanilla JS). Second was a React rendering optimization problem where they gave me a component tree and asked me to identify and fix what was causing unnecessary re-renders. Medium difficulty overall. React hooks knowledge matters here.
Onsite (4 rounds, done over Zoom): Coding round: Leetcode-style but practical. They gave me a scenario involving an infinite scroll feed. Had to handle pagination state, loading states, and error boundaries. System design: Design a video player component with adaptive bitrate logic. This was the most interesting one. They weren't looking for deep streaming protocol knowledge but did want to see you think about buffering UI, fallback states, and performance. The weird CSS round: I was not expecting this. They gave me a Figma mockup of a Disney+ UI element and asked me to implement it live. Flexbox-heavy layout with some animation. The "weird" part was they specifically asked about CSS specificity conflicts and how I'd handle theming in a design system context. Behavioral: Values-focused. Disney leans hard into the "storytelling" and "guest experience" framing. They asked about a time I had to balance technical tradeoffs against user experience, and a time I had to work across teams to ship something.
Leveling: The role was L4 equivalent (they call it something else internally). Comp was reasonable for LA/Burbank, not Bay Area money. Base around $155k, equity was modest compared to big tech.
Prep tips: Know React deeply. Know how to talk about performance. And seriously, brush up on CSS grid and flexbox because apparently Disney UI teams care a lot about that stuff. The system design question skewed frontend, not distributed systems, which was a relief.
Happy to answer questions.