Went through a VMware senior frontend engineer interview earlier this spring. The role was on their Aria (formerly vRealize) UI platform team, which if you don't know is the UI layer for their cloud management products. Wanted to share because frontend loops vary a lot and I found most existing reports were about their backend/infra process.
Process: recruiter screen, one technical phone screen, then a virtual onsite with four interviews.
Phone screen: Live coding in CodePen. They gave me a component to build from scratch: a filterable list with debounced search input and a loading state. React, no specific library constraints. They watched how I structured state, whether I reached for useCallback appropriately, how I named things. The interviewer commented at the end that they look for 'deliberate choices' not just 'it works.' I think what that means is: be able to explain why you made each decision.
Onsite round 1: More coding. A multi-step form with validation and conditional field visibility. Medium complexity. They asked about accessibility halfway through and I talked about aria attributes and keyboard navigation, which they seemed to care about more than I expected. If you're going for their product UI teams, know accessibility basics.
Onsite round 2: System design for frontend. This is the round that surprised me. They asked me to design the component architecture for a complex dashboard with real-time data updates. We talked about: how to structure the component tree, where to put shared state, how to handle websocket updates without re-rendering the whole tree, how to manage performance with large datasets in the DOM. It was a real conversation, not a quiz. Know React performance patterns (memoization, virtualization) and have opinions about state management (I'm a Zustand + React Query person and they asked me to compare that to Redux).
Onsite round 3: Design systems and collaboration. Talked through my experience building or consuming design systems. How I work with designers. How I handle design-to-dev handoff. This was more of a culture/workflow interview than a technical one.
Onsite round 4: Behavioral. Standard.
They moved quickly after the onsite. Feedback was that they liked my accessibility awareness and the way I talked through tradeoffs in round 2. Pay for senior frontend was competitive with what I've seen elsewhere in enterprise software, not FAANG-level but solid.
If you're interviewing for a frontend role there, brush up on React performance patterns and know at least the surface area of accessibility standards. The design system conversation is also worth preparing for.