Went through the Morgan Stanley frontend/web engineer loop earlier this year for a VP-level IC role on one of their client portal teams. Took notes after each round, posting the summary here.
Round 1: Phone screen with recruiter Standard. Timeline, comp expectations, why Morgan Stanley. They asked about my experience with React and TypeScript up front which I appreciated as a quick filter.
Round 2: Technical screen with an engineer This was a LeetCode medium in a shared editor. I got an array manipulation problem and a follow-up about time complexity. They also asked me to write a small JavaScript function to debounce an event handler. That second question felt very frontend-specific and caught me off guard because I'd been grinding algorithmic problems only.
Lesson: for frontend roles, practice JS fundamentals too. Closures, event loops, debounce/throttle, async/await, promise chaining. They care about this stuff.
Round 3: System/UI design I had to design a data table component that displays real-time streaming market data. Think updating price quotes, sortable columns, pagination. They cared about: How I'd handle streaming updates without thrashing the DOM Virtualization for large row counts State management when filters + live data interact
This was the most interesting round. Very domain-relevant. Nothing like designing a Twitter feed.
Round 4: Behavioral Full STAR format. Three questions: describe a conflict with a stakeholder, a time you improved a frontend system's performance, and a time you had to push back on a product decision. They were thorough and dug into specifics.
Observations overall The process felt more structured than startup interviews. Each round had a clear rubric. The interviewers stayed on topic and didn't go off-script. It's not the most creative process but it's fair.
Comp for VP frontend IC in NYC: my offer was around $190k base, bonus target around 20%, plus some deferred comp I'm still parsing.