went through the tesla frontend SWE loop earlier this year, mid-level role (3-5 YOE target). sharing because most posts i found were either super old or for backend/full-stack roles.
rounds: online coding assessment -- same as what others describe. two medium problems, not frontend-specific at all. pure algo. phone screen with engineer: started with one more medium LC problem (string parsing), then pivoted to frontend-specific stuff. they asked me to describe how React reconciliation works and when you'd actually want to use useMemo. not looking for textbook answers, they wanted me to explain trade-offs and when NOT to bother. virtual onsite: 4 rounds over one day.
round breakdowns: coding 1: medium array problem. interviewer was pretty quiet, i had to drive. talked through brute force first, then optimized. coding 2: implement a simplified version of debounce from scratch. then they extended it: make it cancelable. this felt very frontend-specific and was honestly the most fun round. system design: design a real-time dashboard that updates from a data stream. they expected me to talk through WebSocket vs polling trade-offs, how to throttle UI updates so the browser doesn't die, and some light discussion of state management at scale. i used React context / zustand as examples and that was fine. behavioral: tesla behavioral rounds are heavier than i expected. one full hour. questions about handling pressure, making decisions without full info, and disagreeing with a manager. they use STAR but want specifics, not a polished PR answer.
what surprised me: they do NOT care about CSS trivia. nobody asked me to explain flexbox. they DO care about perf. rendering performance, avoiding jank, measuring with DevTools. comes up in both system design and behavioral. tesla UI is heavily internal tooling (manufacturing ops, fleet monitoring). they want frontend engineers who understand data-heavy interfaces, not consumer mobile UX.
overall the loop was 5.5 weeks total. the recruiter was pretty slow to respond between stages but the engineers were engaged during interviews.