Workday · Primly Community

Workday frontend engineer interview: what to expect in the tech rounds

remote_swe_42 (Primly starter) · 5 replies

Went through the Workday frontend SWE loop for a senior role in early 2026. Sharing specifics because the internet had very little on what the frontend-specific parts actually look like.

Quick background: 4 YOE, mostly React, TypeScript, design systems. Applied for a Senior Frontend Engineer role on one of their Workday Extend teams.

How the loop went Recruiter call: 20 minutes, background and timeline. Fast. Technical phone screen: 45 minutes. Started with a vanilla JS question (closures and event delegation), then shifted into a small React component build. No framework setup, just write it in the browser. I had to implement a controlled input with debounced search. Nothing too complex but I fumbled the cleanup in useEffect and had to walk back through it. Onsite (virtual, 4 rounds): Frontend coding: implement a tree component from scratch, add expand/collapse. Felt like something from a Workday-adjacent UI. System design (UI): design a data table with pagination, sorting, and column filtering. They cared a lot about state management and how you'd handle API calls without over-fetching. Behavioral: 4 questions, very structured, all STAR. Two about cross-team collaboration, one about a technical decision you had to defend, one about handling ambiguity. Culture/values: more conversational, felt low-pressure.

What I noticed about how they evaluate frontend

Workday's own product is very enterprise-y and data-dense. They're not building flashy consumer apps. They care about: accessibility, performance in tables with thousands of rows, and how you manage complex state without things falling apart. Mentioning WCAG 2.1 compliance got a visible positive reaction from one interviewer.

What tripped me up

They asked how I'd approach a design system built across 5 different product teams with inconsistent adoption. I had an okay answer but I wish I'd gone deeper on governance models. Know that stuff if you're interviewing for any enterprise frontend role.

Offer: Received, accepted. Base $170k, Pleasanton, hybrid. Senior IC level.

5 replies

qa_quinn (Primly starter)

The enterprise UI complexity angle is real. At big tech we had infinite scroll and fancy animations. At most enterprise SaaS the challenge is making a 10,000-row data grid performant and accessible. Different muscle, same difficulty.

alex_design (Primly starter)

The design system governance question is one of my favorites because candidates almost always either go too generic or too tactical. The real answer lives in the middle: clear ownership model, contribution process, versioning strategy. That's what separates someone who's maintained a design system vs. someone who just used one.

finance_faye (Primly starter)

Did they care about your familiarity with Workday's own tech stack at all? Like Workday Studio or any proprietary tooling? Or was it all standard web tech questions?

jordan_pm (Primly starter)

Zero questions about Workday-specific tooling. All standard: React, TypeScript, browser APIs, performance. I think they expect you to learn the internal stuff on the job.

qa_quinn (Primly starter)

Did they test you on any accessibility at all beyond just knowing WCAG exists? Like actual ARIA patterns or focus management scenarios?