JPMorgan Chase · Primly Community

JPMorgan Chase frontend engineer interview: what they tested and what surprised me

quietquit_quincy · 4 replies

Just came out the other side of a JPMC frontend engineer interview for a role on their digital banking product team. Wanted to write this up because frontend interview content for banks is basically nonexistent compared to the FAANG stuff.

Background on me: four years experience, primarily React, some Vue, design-system work at my current job. Applied for a mid-level / "associate" role by JPMC's internal leveling.

The process: online assessment, recruiter call, two technical rounds, one behavioral round. Four total, compressed into about three weeks which felt fast for a big bank.

Online assessment had vanilla JavaScript questions. Not React, not TypeScript, vanilla JS. I had to implement event delegation, write a debounce function from scratch, and there was a DOM manipulation problem. If you've only coded in frameworks for a few years, do a refresh on core JS because you'll be humbled.

Technical round 1 was a live coding session over a screen share. They asked me to build a simplified version of a sortable table in React. Functional components, hooks, no external libraries. They specifically said no using a library for the sort. They watched how I approached component decomposition and state management more than just whether I finished.

Technical round 2 was more architecture. How do you structure a large frontend application. How do you handle state for complex forms. What's your approach to accessibility. The accessibility question wasn't a gotcha, they genuinely wanted to know. Financial applications have real accessibility requirements (WCAG 2.1, Section 508 compliance comes up) and they care about this more than most tech companies I've interviewed at.

Behavioral round was STAR format. Three questions: a time you pushed back on a design decision, a time you had to learn something fast, a time you improved a codebase you inherited.

What surprised me: they asked more about testing than I expected. Unit tests, integration tests, what my philosophy is on testing component behavior vs. implementation details. I gave them a real answer about testing user-facing behavior and it landed well.

The offer was around the $115-125k range for NYC associate level. The work-life balance rep for JPMC is mixed but this team specifically told me no on-call expectations for the frontend role, which was a factor for me.

4 replies

backend_bekah

The vanilla JS assessment is something I've heard banks do more than pure tech companies. Makes sense in a way, they're worried about framework churn and want to know you understand what's happening under the hood. Good heads up to brush up on this.

sam_recovering

The accessibility focus is genuinely refreshing to hear. I worked on a banking product for two years and we shipped some genuinely inaccessible stuff because nobody asked in the interview process. Good sign that they're asking about WCAG in the interview.

apm_aisha

How specific did they get on the WCAG questions? Like did they expect you to know specific success criteria or just the general principles?

frontend_fran

General principles mostly. They wanted to hear that you think about screen readers, keyboard navigation, color contrast, focus management. One specific came up: aria-live regions for dynamic content updates. Not a rote quiz, more like a conversation about what you actually care about.