interviewed for a senior frontend engineer role at Sony Interactive Entertainment earlier this year. made it through the full loop. thought i'd write this up because the Sony frontend interview process has some quirks that surprised me.
the team was on the PlayStation web services side, building tooling for developers who make PS5 games. not a traditional e-commerce frontend, more of a developer portal / internal tooling product. knowing that going in matters for how you pitch yourself.
recruiter screen: usual logistics stuff. she was clear about the comp band upfront: $180k-$220k base for senior level in San Mateo. that was helpful. total comp with RSUs and bonus landing around $230k-$260k, which is honest-but-not-spectacular for bay area senior frontend.
technical phone screen (1 hour): vanilla JS first. no frameworks. they had me implement a debounce function, then explain event delegation, then talk through the browser rendering pipeline. i haven't been asked that last thing in years but it's legitimately important for performance work so i can't complain.
onsite (4 rounds): coding: JavaScript-specific, not leetcode-style. one problem about building a small state manager from scratch, one about async queue handling. both very practical. system design: design a component library for cross-platform use. i talked about accessibility standards, token-based theming, tree shaking for bundle size. this went well. frontend deep-dive: they asked me to review a code snippet with some perf and accessibility issues and explain what i'd fix and why. this felt like the actual job. behavioral: STAR format. one conflict, one shipping-under-pressure story.
overall: they care about fundamentals more than framework fluency. if you can explain what react is doing under the hood, that matters more than knowing every hook. bring accessibility knowledge, it came up unprompted in two rounds.