went through GitHub's frontend engineer interview loop this spring and wanted to write this up while it was still fresh. applied for a mid-level FE role, remote, through their careers page.
timeline: recruiter screen to offer was about 5.5 weeks. faster than i expected given some companies are taking 8-10 weeks right now.
rounds:
recruiter screen (25 min): standard background, YOE, current role, availability. recruiter was actually really good, not just box-checking. asked what specifically drew me to GitHub vs other developer tooling companies.
technical screen (60 min): one hour with an engineer. split roughly 60/40 between a JavaScript problem and conversation. the JS problem was medium difficulty. they wanted me to implement a simplified debounce function from scratch and then extend it with a cancel method. classic but tests fundamentals well. the conversation touched on how i think about performance in React apps.
virtual onsite (4 rounds): coding round: two problems. an array manipulation problem, LC medium, and something tree-related that i genuinely struggled with but the interviewer was collaborative, not adversarial. system design / frontend architecture: design a collaborative code editor, kind of like what's in github.dev. they cared a lot about state management across multiple cursors, conflict resolution, websocket handling. this was the most interesting round honestly. cross-functional: a round with someone from PM. felt more like a chat about how i've worked with designers and PMs, how i handle scope creep, what i do when designs are ambiguous. behavioral: classic STAR round. questions like 'tell me about a time you pushed back on a product decision' and 'how have you made something significantly more accessible.'
what mattered most: i think the system design round was the real differentiator. know your websockets, know how collaborative editors handle operational transforms or CRDTs at a conceptual level (you don't need to implement one, just know what problem they solve). performance and accessibility literacy also came up more than once.
got an offer. comp negotiation is a separate story but the range was competitive for 2026 mid-level remote. happy to answer questions.