Finished my Disney onsite last month. Writing this up while it's fresh. This was for a senior frontend/fullstack role on the Disney+ web team, based in San Francisco.
The onsite was 4 hours virtual, split into 4 rounds with short breaks. Here's exactly how each went:
Round 1: Coding (45 min) Two problems in a shared IDE. First was a string parsing problem, medium difficulty. Second was a tree traversal. I didn't finish the second one perfectly but walked through my approach clearly. They told me after that talking through partial solutions is fine if you're explicit about what you'd fix.
Round 2: System Design (60 min) Design a scalable notification system for Disney+ (think 'your show dropped a new episode'). Push notifications, email, and in-app. They wanted me to think about fan-out at scale, deduplication, and user preferences. Pretty standard distributed systems territory but they pushed on the user preferences model more than I expected. Who owns that data? How does it sync across devices?
Round 3: Behavioral (45 min) Senior hiring manager. Heavy on leadership and influence without authority. 'Tell me about a time you drove alignment across multiple teams.' 'Describe a time you pushed back on a product decision and what happened.' Had my STAR stories prepped and it went smoothly.
Round 4: Behavioral / Culture (45 min) Another senior IC from the team. More conversational than structured. We talked about how I approach code reviews, what I think makes a good engineering culture, and what drew me to Disney specifically. This felt like the 'would I want to work with this person' round.
Debrief: I got a call from the recruiter 8 days later. Offer extended. The wait was the hardest part. No status update in between.
One thing I didn't expect: they asked multiple rounds about how I collaborate with designers and PMs. The Disney+ web team seems to care a lot about cross-functional communication, probably because design is so central to the Disney brand.