Went through Target's frontend engineering interview last month for an SWE II role on their Digital Guest Experience team, which owns the Target.com shopping experience. Sharing the breakdown because frontend-specific info for Target is weirdly sparse.
Recruiter screen (30 min): Intro call, covered background, current stack, why Target, and logistics (Minneapolis HQ, hybrid expected for this one). They mentioned their frontend stack is React + TypeScript with some legacy Angular they're migrating away from.
Technical phone screen (60 min): One coding problem using JavaScript: given a product list with categories and ratings, write a filter/sort function. Medium complexity, they let you use whatever browser APIs you want, no algorithmic tricks needed. Then about 20 minutes on frontend fundamentals: explain the virtual DOM, how does reconciliation work, when would you use useCallback vs useMemo, how do you approach performance optimization in React.
They weren't quizzing me on obscure edge cases. More validating that I actually understand what's happening under the hood.
Onsite (virtual, 4 rounds):
Coding round: One medium LC problem, array/object manipulation. Nothing hardcore algorithmic. Standard ES6+ was fine. They wanted clean readable code more than a clever one-liner.
Frontend system design: Design a product listing page with filters, pagination, and cart state. Not a backend system design, genuinely frontend-focused. Talked about component hierarchy, state management approach (they seemed to prefer signals/context over prop drilling at the component graph level), lazy loading, accessibility (they asked about ARIA roles specifically), and performance with large product catalogs. This was the round I felt most at home in.
Behavioral: Three interviewers, mixed eng backgrounds. Standard STAR. They pushed on a time I had to advocate for an unpopular technical decision and how I handled disagreement on a design. I prepped for this but they asked follow-up questions that went deeper than I expected.
Cross-functional collab round: PM + designer. They asked how I partner with design when specs don't translate cleanly to implementation, which is basically my whole job. This felt more like a conversation than an eval.
Overall impression: Target's frontend team is more sophisticated than people give it credit for. They're handling real scale, Target.com gets meaningful traffic and their performance bar showed in the system design questions. If you're prepping: know React deeply (not just API usage), think about accessibility, and have a real answer for performance at scale.