went through the replit frontend engineer loop in early 2026, made it to offer (accepted). sharing specifics because i could barely find anything recent when i was prepping.
background: 4 years react, mostly design system and editor tooling work, which is probably why i got the call in the first place.
phone screen with recruiter - standard, 30 min. they mentioned upfront that replit is very product-focused and they want engineers who have opinions about developer experience. that framing is real, not marketing speak.
take-home - i got a prompt around building a simple collaborative editing UI component. they gave me a repl template to start from. not super hard but there were interesting edge cases around cursor state and perf. took me about 5 hours.
technical screen - one engineer, 60 min. walked through my take-home for the first half. second half: live coding, they had me implement a simplified version of a react hook for managing async state (useAsync kind of thing). nothing tricky, but they cared about the API design, not just the implementation. lots of 'why did you design the interface this way' conversation.
onsite (virtual) - 4 sessions: frontend systems: how would you build X feature at scale, where X was a multi-pane code editor with live preview. very open ended. coding round: medium algo problem, clean code mattered. cross-functional: worked through a product scenario with a PM. what would you prioritize to improve the repl loading experience. values round: working with ambiguity, disagreeing with a tech decision, shipping something scrappy vs right.
comp offer: $175k base, remote, equity on top. role was senior IC (they call it something like L5 equivalent i think).
tips: if you've built any kind of dev tooling, editor features, or collaborative UIs, lean in hard. that's their sweet spot. react performance knowledge matters. they ask about web workers, virtual dom tradeoffs, rendering patterns.